


Molting Memories

by LadamaB



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Amnesia, Canon-Typical Violence, Extremely Unreliable Narrator, F/F, Guardian Angels, He's confused y'all, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Character Death, Mystery, Romance, Supernatural - Freeform, Suspense, Thriller, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-02-15 04:19:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 44,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13023096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadamaB/pseuds/LadamaB
Summary: Few people ever found themselves in need of an angel, the creatures only arrived when their humans were in grave danger but not yet destined to die. It was so exceedingly rare that human sciences dismissed the idea as the sightings became less and less common. Hanzo had been in the presence of an angel. By all indications, he’d also killed him.





	1. Nothing is ever lost to us so long as we remember it

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Nothing is ever lost to us so long as we remember it." L.M. Montgomery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look guys, I finally followed through with that thing I said I'd do!

_“Hanzo, no! Please, what are you doing?!”_  
  
He crouched over the downed body of a man, of an _angel_ with its broken wings outstretched on either side holding a long knife in one hand and a fist full of feathers in the other. The injuries were grave but if he stopped to help the creature, he might just be able to save him… but Hanzo wouldn’t. He would turn around and he would leave as he always did each time before, never turning back to pick up the fallen guardian despite how much he wanted to.

Blood pooled on the cement, coating the refuse and grime. Regal features watched up in disbelief; he looked down in complete apathy. Standing there in an alleyway that Hanzo could describe in agonizing detail by this point, he regarded his knife with a feigned interest.

Hanzo could tell you how many air-conditioning units sat in the secluded back street, he could describe in detail which ones had been wrenched free of their windows by the frantic flapping of long tawny wings. He could go into exquisite and excruciating detail about the way the skin between his guardian angel’s strong brows crinkled in confusion or the way the light escaped his almond eyes as more and more _blood_ flowed freely.

He could tell you how many tears of disbelief and pain fell from warm brown orbs. Hanzo hazarded that he could even take the time to count _exactly_ how many primaries had been ripped free and laid flung over the filled trash bags piled on the wayside. After all, this was the same every time it happened. What was a bit of distraction now and again?

His eyes traced over the edges of the ordinary hunting knife as if it were the most ornate of hand-crafted swords, blood glistening dark in the stormy night and spreading everywhere when the rain mixed with life essence to stain his hands. Sometimes when he looked down he could still see it; no amount of soap would ever clean it off.

“Hanzo _please--”_ The angel begged again, reaching with an outstretched hand though the motion drug his worthless wings against the ground and caused the gaping wound to _gush._ He could have saved the angel; he _should_ have saved him. He watched as his own hands threw the feathers back at the creature so desperately begging him for an intervention in mockery. Hanzo watched as his own feet began to back away.

 _‘No,’_ His conscious mind would always scream, a cri de coeur that begged and pleaded for those feet to stop in their retreat. _‘No, go back, don’t leave him what are you doing!? That’s your angel, why would you leave him? Go back! Go back!!’_

...but they didn’t and they wouldn’t and nothing he could ever do would ever stop them. The rain raged stronger and the blood began to run, long rivulets of life from a protector felled by its own guarded human. He knew that he would retreat and back away from that garbage filled alley, leaving the angel to slowly die of internal bleeding. If he was going to murder the creature it would be only fair, only merciful, to kill it in one go and not to leave it there to suffer.

In his dreams, Hanzo was not merciful.

No matter how many times he watched this scene play out from the back seat, trapped in a portion of his mind where the real Hanzo screamed in agony and cried tears of regret for what _could have been,_ the feet would not stop walking. His body would not quit running away. No matter how many times the angel begged him or how slow the time ran while he was leaving the creature where it had fallen after his betrayal, Hanzo would not turn around.

“Why did you do this to me?” The angel cried as he always did when Hanzo reached the end of the alleyway. His mutinous feet paused as they always would and turned to regard the angel for a moment or two. Being a passenger didn’t mean that he couldn’t feel his face as it twisted into what could have been a grimace or could have been a _grin._ Hanzo couldn’t _know_ because this wasn’t him. Whoever it was in his body with this knife on this night with _his angel_ was in control of the show; this was a memory and nothing he did could ever change it.

Hanzo didn’t even know Angels could bleed; yet this one had bled and even _died._

“Genji,” His own voice called, soft and almost sad in a mockery of care that couldn’t be true after this _murder._ There came a pregnant pause and by now he could count the very milliseconds as they passed, between the first fateful name to the breath of betrayal that would inevitably follow. Genji, his angel’s name was _Genji,_ and Hanzo swore that he’d never forget that name.

_“Genji, you did this to yourself.”_

Then he left; he always did. Hanzo turned on his heel and walked from the alley like it was nothing and it _was_ nothing to the man in the body that Hanzo now found himself trapped in. The backseat driver hoped against hope that this time it would be different. That this time he could jump the partition and hop into the front seat; wishing and hoping and _praying_ that this time he could wrench the power from the _psychopath_ at the wheel and take control.

The ending was always the same. He ran from the alley and he never looked back. Few people ever found themselves in need of an angel, the creatures only arrived when their humans were in grave danger but not yet destined to die. It was so exceedingly rare that human sciences dismissed the idea as the sightings became less and less common. Hanzo had been in the presence of an angel. By all indications, he’d also killed him.

 

\--

 

The figure lurched up from his position in the bed, gasping in air and clutching his chest as he fumbled around in the dark to turn on the light on the side table. The blinking red lights beside the bed read ‘0424’, flashing as if to mock the frantically shaking man. As the second-hand lamp came on, he squinted into the light and pulled open the top drawer to search around for the journal that he always kept there.

_“State your name for the record?”_

Pale hands, one arm covered in a tattoo sleeve he couldn’t remember sitting for and the other mottled with small scars that he didn’t remember getting, opened the journal and clicked the ballpoint pen that could be found inside. _December 8th, 2020, No changes in nightmare noted._

_“John Doe, ID #47846236.”_

This was one of the many therapy channels that his army of shrinks had foisted upon him. They’d tried everything from the ways that were known to work, such as occupational memory recovery, to the newer therapies including smart devices. He ate what they told him would help, even. He did everything he could think of to try and recover some sliver of what he used to be but at the end of the day nothing would work.

Doe had been like this for 10 years, a same dream every night evidenced by the piles of records that he kept. Every page in this journal was filled with that line, line after line of the same _nothingness._ Just a man in alone in the world without a past, without a name, without a family or a home.

_“Your CT testing has come back to show no points on your brain where damage explaining your loss in memory can be explained. While the psychiatrists say cognitive testing shows no sign of deceit, the police chief and I are significantly less convinced. John, how are we supposed to believe someone who has no proof?”_

He threw his legs over the side of the bed and slowly slipped on the house shoes that sat beside the side table as they always did. The alarm was set to go off in a half an hour anyway so Doe figured he may as well get up and get moving. His morning coffee waited for no man.

_“I don’t know sir. Please call me Hanzo.”_

He stood and pulled his robe from the nearby dressing chair, pulling it over his shoulders to protect from the chill that the apartment always had in winter. When living in Philadelphia, or anywhere on the East coast, housing was in a high demand and with no background past ten years ago and a legal name of ‘John Doe’ with a string of numbers for his ID, there were few people who would rent to someone like him. He’d managed to find a kindly old doctor and his son to rent him out this apartment for dirt cheap and the nearby Buddhist monk who ran a semi-public library was more than happy to offer Hanzo a job.

This was his life now. A constant wondering of what was and what could have been. Whenever a new shrink called him out of the blue to offer an exciting new way to fuck around with his head, Hanzo inwardly cringed but accepted. Regaining his memories, discovering _why_ he had killed his angel, was the most important thing to him but he would be lying if he didn’t say that he hated every single second of going to an office. It wasn’t bad enough that they wanted him to try yoga or cooking traditional Japanese meals to reclaim memories, some of them wanted to get in his head _too._

Hanzo _refused_ to consent to a biopsy. There was no way to know if he’d come back from that the same. There was no way to know if he'd come back from that at _all._

_“Is that the same name that your angel called you in the dream?”_

Simple DNA testing had revealed that he was Japanese, to the surprise of exactly no one. He'd woken up speaking the language and the only names he could remember were so fundamentally Japanese, it would make less sense if he wasn’t. There were no records on file; no dental or medical, not so much as a fingerprint to tell him who he was before or what he’d done with his life all that time. When Hanzo had been found, he had no wallet or keys. No identifying factors of any kind save for the tattoo and no artist in the country had claimed it. He would be willing to bet that it was the most widely recognizable traditional Japanese sleeve in the world with as many times as it had aired on late night television.

He slipped into the bathroom to relieve himself, hanging up the gown on a nearby hook and turning on the shower. The old pipes in this place knocked and banged whenever he used the facilities and the hot water took an _age_ to heat up, but it was the only home he’d ever known in however long he’d been alive.

Doctors estimated that Hanzo was somewhere to the tune of 30, give or take a few years. It was impossible to know. He didn’t have a birthday either. A quick google search and Hanzo had chosen May 9th out of the sheer irony. The Day of the Lost Sock; it seemed fitting for him to have it as a birthday as he’d lost everything including his socks.

_“Hai. It’s the only tie I have to who I was and it feels better than ‘John.’ Hanzo means one half and… I’m only half of myself without my memories.”_

_“Sure, whatever kid.”_

He slipped into the shower, relishing how the near scorching liquid chased away the chill and ache in his bones. The apartment building had been built in the mid 1800’s as a hospital and then converted to apartments. There were some days that Hanzo wasn’t so sure it hadn’t been condemned, at least the lower floors. He was on the top level and while it was only a few small rooms, he was happy to have a place to call home.

_“I don’t know how else to prove that I can’t remember anything. I’ve submitted to every test that you’ve asked for and you haven’t even charged me with a crime. Other than the dream of me killing an angel, something that the government doesn’t even believe exists, I haven’t done anything to deserve your suspicion.”_

Ten years of being on his own without the faintest recollection of his past; ten years of being a medical oddity and resident guinea pig for the doctors of the region. Surrounded by this many prestigious medical schools meant that he had a new doctoral candidate knocking on his door every other week. He’d learned to ask for money in exchange for being a part of their studies and that had padded his librarian’s income quite nicely.

No matter how nice the nest egg though, this was still the East Coast and the price of living out here didn’t allow for egregious spending.

A sharp crack of thunder outside caused the lights to flicker and he just prayed that his tiny apartment didn’t lose power in the middle of a cold snap. _Again._ The East Coast was notorious for its icy winters and while Hanzo had become accustomed to wearing multiple layers of clothing, he didn’t want to be required to _in his own home._ Was that really so much to ask? The lights flickered again and then went out. Hanzo’s fist came to strike the wall in frustration, careful not to knock another tile loose.

The moment that the chill had been knocked out of his bones, Hanzo turned the shower off and stepped out, toweling down as quickly as possible before snuggling back into his fluffy robe. The last time this had happened, he’d caught his foot on the lip of the tub and busted his ass on the tile floor. That was an experience that he had no desire to repeat again, instead carefully holding onto both the shower rod and the towel rack before blindly feeling around in the darkness with his feet. It was only after he got out and began to dry his hair with the towel that the lights in the apartment flickered back to life, once again lighting the way back to the bedroom. Hanzo would have been more annoyed if this wasn’t such a common occurrence around here; now he was simply resigned.

Grabbing his toothbrush and squirting a bit of toothpaste on, Hanzo continued to move around with his morning routines. Underwear, socks, pants. Undershirt, t-shirt, sweater. Belt, boots, watch. Hair pulled back, beard clipped, piercings cleaned. The morning shuffle that came like breathing, adulthood and responsibility being essentially all he’d ever known.

Hanzo walked over to the largest window, pulling back the thick blanket he had draped over the glass behind his curtains. The instant chill of cold air that seeped around the ancient single pane windows caused a shiver to run down his arms, even after the hot shower. Sun was still down, at 0503 it would be, the lights on Liberty One and Two shining down on his humble abode and he could swear he saw and heard no less than three sirens. 

Such was the life in West Philadelphia. It was really too bad that he couldn’t also have an uncle who lived in Bel-Air… or really anywhere further south than _here._ He’d settle for Florida, even taking into consideration the general fascination with geriatrics and sweaters at 75 degrees. Maybe next time he felt like a real asshole, Hanzo could just feed himself to an alligator instead of considering tossing himself into the Delaware. Honestly, it was a real waste of meat to freeze to death when he could be feeding the wildlife.

Welcome to Florida; do whatever the signs tell you _not to._

The sad reality of it was that he always had a tab or two open on his computer, checking the price of one-way tickets to Miami. All jokes aside, it was probably a good thing that he’s never been able to afford one. Hanzo sighed, putting the blanket back in its place and pulled the fitted insulating blanket over his aquarium to keep out the cold. The fish had their own heater built into the tank so that if anything ever happened while he was out, the back up battery would keep the tropical fish from dying. Those suckers were fucking expensive and he didn’t want to replace them. Besides, Hanzo was pretty fond of the gray-green dragonfish. That one was his favorite; he’d named it Soba, even though it hardly looked as appetizing as its namesake.

Poor Soba was an ugly motherfucker.

The rain and sleet outside the window had really started to pick up, taking his half-baked plans to jog and tossing them directly into the toilet. There was no way that he could get out and exercise in this, so he resolved to just run stairs later after work. Not for the first time, Hanzo considered getting a subscription to a gym but his financial situation wouldn’t allow for it, not if he wanted to get Soba’s fish food sent in from Guam.

More importantly, Hanzo needed coffee. His favorite place was warm, had free wifi and really, he couldn’t say he’d ever _truly_ been cold until the first time he’d gotten excited over sliding into a jam-packed coffee shop that might or might have not smelled like weed. It was the only place in the area that’s open at 0530 anyway. He grabbed his satchel and slid the beat up old laptop inside along with his memory journal, pulling on gloves and a hat before locking the door on his way out.

Hanzo jogged down the stairs, huffing air into his gloves to try and warm up his fingers. Four flights of stairs didn’t seem all that bad on the way down but getting back up here every night was a herculean trial in and of itself. The coffee shop that he favored was actually in the same building as his apartment, so at least he didn’t have to be outside in the sleet for more than a few minutes at most. Hanzo had to throw his shoulder against the iced over door on the side of the building to get it open, threatening to break something other than the frost keeping it shut as it did every morning. This morning the door was particularly well glued due to the wind whipping the sleet through the narrow alleyway. Nevertheless, he got out. Past the pile of refuse and the odd homeless guy that he was only 60 percent sure was still alive, Hanzo trudged around the building and into the shop. 

Thunderbird Brew: not the best nor the worst but definitely the highest THC content in town. Hanzo slipped in behind the modest line, glad that because he’d gotten there so early, he wouldn’t have to wait for as long to get to the front. So he flicked his phone on, reading the news after connecting to the WiFi. Honestly, the legalization of cannabis in the United States had been a huge boon to the economy, allowing for little places like this to go on the books and make a _killing._ Getting it legal had nearly taken an act of God but no one could argue with the results.

He slid over the news, outrage over the election results still going after nearly a month, scrolling it down further until he found the weather section. Hanzo had checked the weather the night before, using the weak signal from the shop in the stairwell before going back up to his apartment, and he had hoped that the warnings of ‘Massive Winter Superstorm’ had been just some kind of hallucination. Unfortunately, it hadn’t. He frowned at the mass of ice and snow that had torn its way across the country, watching the wisps of it moving closer and closer to Philly--it was due to really hit in force by 3 pm but with the sleet already falling, Hanzo would estimate that was wrong.

 _‘Well, better go to the store before all the milk and bread was gone.’_ Hanzo snorted through his nose, shaking his head and sliding the phone into his back pocket. At this point, everything he thought or said was steeped in sarcasm. Milk was a no-go as he was lactose intolerant, a trait shared by every asian _ever._ Bread was sort of a moot point as well, it didn’t make sense to buy something that would just go bad in a week if you were looking at the possibility of a long term power outage.

No, he’d need at least four packs of batteries for Soba’s warmer and a tank of propane for the emergency heater he’d installed. He began to mentally tally whether he could afford two tanks, maybe he could put off the phone bill a while…? The utilities would be prorated for the outage--

“Hanzo,” A voice called, an amused tenor followed by a soft whistle and bracelet stacked hand waving to bring him back into the here and now. “Hey man, good morning. You want the usual?” The name badge read Halháta, but the regulars knew him around here as Ena. He owned the joint--Hanzo inwardly laughed at his own joke--and even while the coffee shop could run on its own, Ena was always more than willing around to help. After all, his father owned the building; He was the landlord.

“Huh?” Hanzo looked up to make eye contact with the other before averting his eyes and nodding, feeling the usual uncomfortable twist in his lips at social interactions. “Yes. Please.”

“Quiet as ever.” If only he could hear all the shit Hanzo said in his head. Ena grabbed a paper and then plastic cup and began to write on them, rings stacked on his fingers sparkling in the bright lights that illuminated behind the counter while the rest was kept a cozy medium brightness. “You grabbing Mei’s?” He asked, though the man was already halfway through writing her name on the plastic cup before Hanzo had a chance to say ‘yes’.

“How are you so chipper every morning?” Hanzo grumbled, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes and skirting away from the barbell running through the bridge of his nose. The piercing had been there when he ‘woke up’ and he had no recollection of getting it but it seemed to be well maintained and it got him enough compliments that the shy Japanese man hadn’t bothered to take it out.

“Well,” Halháta smirked, handing the cups off to Fareeha to his right before leaning on the counter and blowing a lock of sequoia hair out of his eyes, “I figure I can either laugh or cry and crying would fuck up my guyliner.”

Hanzo couldn’t stop himself from flicking his eyes up to the laughing amber pair and then back down. “You don’t even wear eyeliner.” He mumbled again, tucking a bill into the tip jar and stepped out of the left once the coffee had been paid for and his wallet had been tucked back into his back pocket.

“Ah, but I made you look! Isn’t that worth something?” Ena snickered, entering the next order with his seemingly magical ability to listen to two conversations at once and still be charming in both of them. The woman purchasing the triple shot macchiato as the owner cooed at her seemed to find him charming, at the very least. Hanzo had lived here the last 6 years and the jury was _still_ out.

“I guess.” It was a point. Hanzo had the hardest time making eye contact with people and he didn’t know if that was something he’d always had or if it was a new problem that came with the amnesia… it was as if when he looked someone in the eye too long, Hanzo felt like they might realize that he had no idea what he was doing and this was all an elaborate ruse to appear normal.

That was terrifying.

“Don’t listen to him, Hanzo.” Fareeha smiled, the young Egyptian woman having found employment here after moving to the states because so few people would hire an immigrant with a facial tattoo even with her amazing background in security. Ena treated her kindly and she seemed to like it well enough; she still worked here after all this time. “You keep doing you, ok habibi?”

He smiled, the expression tight on his face and not for the first time, Hanzo wondered if maybe _everyone_ knew how fucked his life was. “Aah-- Thank you.” Words he knew but _didn’t_ came unbidden to his mind, just another example of how much was stripped away. He had woken up speaking both languages… now he could count on one hand how many times he’d spoken his (native?) tongue in the last week.

 _“Anyone with a mental condition such as yours and delusions that include a graphic murder is someone to be suspicious of. If you haven’t done anything yet, there is no promising that you_ won’t _in the future.”_

Hanzo took his book bag and found the little booth in the corner, half-way around the edge of the counter so most of the patrons thought it was for employees and thus it was always empty, and settled down. He took his laptop out and plugged it in at the electrical outlet behind him, not needing to go hunting for the power source any more.

Headphones in, computer open and homework out in front of him; the crunch to finals week had hit everyone really hard. Hanzo was no different. Getting an organization to let him get credits had been difficult but there had been a really great scholarship given out by Johns Hopkins that allowed him to study there. In return for keeping a high GPA--which Hanzo was _obsessive_ about his grade point average--and letting them use him as a living textbook on extreme retrograde amnesia, he was allowed to study there. That wasn’t to say he wasn’t always looking for other scholarships to cover the gaps and busting his ass to pay for the rest, but it helped that being a _freak_ got him his diploma.

Ten years of being in the dark and John Doe #47846236 was about to finish his credit requirement. One more round of finals and he would be able to start on his thesis.  
  
It wasn’t as if Hanzo had any idea what he’d do once he got to put ‘Ph.D.’ behind all those numbers, but it was the thing he was most proud of. Ten years of being lost, alone, confused and helpless, soon enough he’d be Dr. Doe.

Hanzo only wished that it brought him more satisfaction.

Feeling of the table shifting alerted him to Halháta sliding into the chair directly across from where Hanzo’s back sat to the corner. He pulled his earbuds out, offering a small smile to his landlord while the man put both coffees down on the table. “You know, Hanzo,” Ena started, stretching out and leaning the chair back onto two legs as if he _knew_ how much that would stress his table-mate out to watch. Words interrupted the mental image of his landlord, someone he might even dare to hesitantly call a friend, falling and splitting his head open on the tiled floor--“I probably should have made you Mei’s a little later. It’s gonna melt on you.”

Mei-Ling Zhou was one of the other librarians where he worked and he swore the woman was _never_ cold. She drank iced coffees all through the most frigid months of the year and somehow managed to maintain warm fingers. What did they say about ‘cold hands, warm heart’? Mei must be some kind of demon.

“...You’re right.” Hanzo hesitantly admitted, pursing his lips while he clicked the earbuds held between the thumb and forefinger of each hand together idly. It was going to melt in the warm coffee shop and then he’d have to buy another.

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll just make you another one on the house. It’s fine.” Ena smiled, reaching out with a single finger to press it into the crinkles between Hanzo’s angry brows. The shorter male jerked back, batting at the offending hand and made a harsh clicking noise under his breath. Hanzo reminded the barista of a declawed cat; hissing and batting but no real threat to anyone. It was too cute to find too intimidating. “Speaking of house, you buying propane today?”

“Yes, they think the heat will be out for an extended period.” Hanzo replied, still rubbing his forehead as if there was a green fingerprint there that needed to be scrubbed off. “I will need to purchase at least two.”

“Here, how much are those things?” Halháta asked, pulling out his wallet. “I should have replaced your windows last summer but I never could get a good bid. The least I could do is cover your heating since it’s gonna be cold as fuck up there.”

Hanzo chewed on his lip, considering it. He had two twenty pound tanks up there and they usually held just under 5 gallons… with the inflated prices for the storm…

 _“So what, I’m a victim of violence which caused me to lose my memories, my home, my family,_ everything, _and you’re more concerned that I_ might _turn out to be a serial murderer?”_

“I think between both of them it’ll probably be something to the tune of fifty bucks.” Hanzo said honestly. His knee jerk reaction was to deny any kind of monetary gift; something about it felt so wrong and just a brief glance through ‘his’ culture, the culture he couldn’t _fucking remember,_ told him that it was considered odd to offer or accept money unless it was a formal occasion.

Common sense and need had broken his pride years ago; Hanzo no longer turned down gifts when given as selflessly as this one. He was in need and even as much as he would rather not take the charity, he had learned the hard way to just smile and nod. Perhaps one day he would be able to say ‘No, thank you’, but today was not that day. The landlord gave a nod, pulling a trio of Jacksons out of his back pocket, waving one hand when Hanzo spluttered at the ten dollars above and beyond what he’d asked for. 

“I know, I know. Don’t worry about it, Han. You’ll just spend it in my coffee shop later anyway.” Halháta smiled, giving a slight wink. Hanzo's face felt hot and he cursed under his breath.

“Domo arigatou, Ena-kun.”  It slipped out before Hanzo had a chance to stop himself, bowing his head as he accepted the gift in both hands and stared down at it as if he expected the stoic faces of the 7th president to reach out and bite his fingers.

“Iie, iie.” Ena chuckled, waving a single hand and standing up. It always struck Hanzo as odd when the American replied to him in Japanese but he accepted it as one of the strange things that made him so charming. Half of the charisma came from his knowledge of ‘Please’, ‘Thank you’, and the accepted equivalent of ‘you’re welcome’ in a variety of languages. It didn’t take a lot of work and it made a world of difference.

Hanzo thought the man ought to own a hotel or at least a concierge service with how well he could anticipate the needs of his customers, but that might just be a pipe dream of an overzealous friend. “Thank you…” He called again, flicking his eyes back up to the barista’s before sipping his coffee with a soft hum.

As Halháta slid back behind the counter, Hanzo began to open his word documents on his computer and settle into the usual routine. The only thing that Hanzo could manage to do for a hobby between graduate studies, his full time job and the handful of things he did only because they elicited ghosts of familiarity as if they used to be something he did _before_ was… writing. He was a writer in his free time between working on a Ph.D. of Mathematics. Hanzo liked to think he was actually quite good, though the anxiety surrounding whether or not that was due to his fan base being kind to him was debatable.

Social dread lead him to think they were just being kind so he’d write them more smut.

_“That or a serial arsonist, I haven’t decided yet.”_

Hanzo shook his head, flinging the ghost of Sgt. Reyes's berating from his mind as he tried to get into the right mindset to work. Another sip of the warm caramel drink, tasting just a hint of the cannabis oil that he hadn’t ordered but knew better than to turn down with how well it eased his anxiety, and then began to write.

His fingers danced at the keyboard, the rhythm of the words and the writing started to wash over him in the way that only a beloved hobby could. The characters moving in his mind’s eye, each their own person with thoughts and feelings, every last detail thought out from the temperature of the tea to exactly where the pink case might have gotten off to. Each and every last detail, from the inner workings of the gun that sat enclosed in Mycroft’s umbrella to the way he made eye contact with his younger sibling and raised an eyebrow at a certain pair of red shorts laying on the stairs on the way up to the flat.

“Poly-blend, crimson...” Hanzo murmured under his breath, eyes closing while his fingers danced over well worn keys and clicked out the mutual chemistry that he knew so well.

“Blimey, Hanzo.” A cheerful cockney accent chimed from over his left shoulder, causing Hanzo to startle so badly he nearly fell out of his fucking chair. “Why’re you so fascinated with John Watson’s shorts?”

 _“Chikushou,_ Lena!” Hanzo gasped, slamming the lid to his laptop shut with one hand while the other one grabbed his chest as if to try and get a grip on his wildly beating heart. Lena Oxton was the local UPS girl and she was just ridiculously speedy and surprisingly good at getting up behind people without them noticing. “Why do you do that? Can’t you knock? Don’t sneak up on me like that-- don’t read over people’s shoulders! Do you not have any shame?”

“Not particularly,” She smiled, spinning cutely before plopping down in the chair across from him with a frothy iced beverage in her hand that she was sipping through one of the bright teal straws that were iconic to the coffee shop. Teal was to Thunderbird as green was to Starbucks; everyone could spot the low key stoners by the kind of coffee cup they had. “You’re the one writing filthy fanfiction in the middle of a coffee shop, luv. It’s good material, that’s why I keep sneakin’ up behind you. If it was shite, I wouldn’t be as nosey.”

Hanzo wasn’t quite sure how to take the way she wrinkled her freckled button nose or winked at him so he just opened his laptop again and tapped the keyboard to wake it back up. “...yeah, ok. Uh, Thank you.” He mumbled, flicking his Opera browser over to Pixiv to troll back through the art looking for the newest thing to transfer over to his Tumblr, with permission of course. It was just about the only thing he used his knowledge of Japanese for these days.

“Awh, loosen up, Hanzo!” Lena laughed, checking her watch subtly as she took another long sip. Honestly, this woman had so much energy that he could barely fathom why she’d bother to buy _coffee._ Seriously, _why?_ “You know, I never ‘ear ya talk as much as you do when you’re tilted like that.”

“That’s because I’m _embarrassed_ .” Hanzo snipped out, his typing fingers jamming the keys a bit harder than he intended but unintentionally made his point. He couldn’t stand invasions of privacy. It made him all kind of twitchy. It wasn’t even as if he didn’t put his name on his work or advertize that he was an author online; there was something about the fact that she’d managed to sneak up _behind_ him without him being aware that really set him off. It wasn’t embarrassment, it was the cold rage of a man who _wouldn’t hesitate._ It _terrified_ him.

Something he had no explanation for didn’t like that she was able to come into his space without him knowing she was there. The same instinct that whispered into his ear to keep his back to the wall, keep eyes on the room, _conceal, don’t feel--_ that was the instinct that suggested that she might just _know too much._ Hanzo pressed his middle finger into his temple, sticking his tongue out at the delivery girl. Better to hide it as something normal, sweep it back under the rug, rather than deal with it and perhaps even admit that something more than just an irrational reaction to a mild irritation was at work here.

“Oh, that’s _real_ mature, Hanzo.” Lena laughed, finishing her coffee and beginning to wipe anti-frost over the goggles she wore while running packages around in and out of warm buildings. The man rolled his eyes, glancing up as the lights flickered in the shop and the sound of sleet becoming something heavier could be heard as the establishment quieted for a moment or two. “Should’a packed me red ‘n yella.” Oxton mumbled, chewing on her thumb nail before starting to zip up her bomber jacket and pull the gloves and scarves on. 

The hardest part about handling Lena was her complete inability to speak _English._ It sounded like English but Hanzo could _swear_ that it _wasn’t._ “...Your what?”

“Umbrella, Hanzo. It means I shoulda brought me umbrella. Is your watch slow?” She teased, accent getting thicker and the cockney slang somehow becoming even _less_ intelligible than before.

“I don’t wear a watch.” Hanzo sniffed, grabbing his earbuds to start plugging them in. “How is Emily?”

“Oh, She’s right Robin Hood, I s’ppose. ‘Aven’t seen ‘er in an age--” The woman snickered, standing up and dropping her empty cup into the nearest trash bin, dodging the stirring stick Hanzo tossed with surprising accuracy across the table. “It’s been good rabbitin’ wit cha, Hanzo! Slaters--”

“I hate you.” He grumbled, crumbling up a napkin and tossing it and miraculously managing to bounce it off the head of spiky brown hair even as she attempted to dodge, laughing the whole way out the door. That girl ran so fast that it was a wonder she even got wet.

He shook his head, putting his headphones in as he pulled open his document once again. Letting the music start to work through his tension, He got back into the right headspace to write the neurotic and ultra-observant Sherlock Holmes; the same guy who can tell you where a victim was 3 hours previous but failed to notice that his boyfriend had been out all day and was replaced with a balloon.

He smirked some, bobbing his head with the hip-hop that he only barely understood. He listened to it for the beat and feeling of the bass in his ears, if he related to the lyrics too? That was just a bonus. ‘Anderson, don’t talk out loud. You lower the IQ of the entire _street.’_ Hanzo found that he really _related_ to Sherlock. Time didn’t flow here as he let his mind become engrossed in the spiderweb he wove.

 _“When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. I can’t be your killer. You have no evidence, no motive, no means, no opportunity, no_ victim. _You have no case.”_

The sound of a new iced coffee being placed in front of him shocked Hanzo from the faraway stare he’d been locked in for who knows how long, looking up to the concerned expression on Fareeha’s face. “You ok, habibi?” She asked, placing a hand on his shoulder. For the second time that morning, the Japanese man startled and felt his heart race, shaking her hand from his arm as he packed up his computer and all of the requisite parts.

 _“Holmes. Doe, you’ve been making snarky quips and references all day... How do you expect me to believe that you don’t remember anything?_ Something _isn’t right with you, I just don’t know_ what _yet.”_

“Yeah. I’m fine. _Please_ don’t touch me.” He muttered, shoving his headphones into the bag and rubbed his forehead again, picking up the iced drink and put it in a drink carrier so he didn’t have to touch it with his bare hands as he prepared for the long trek to the subway.

“Yeah… ok, Hanzo. Sure thing.” Fareeha said slowly, not sure what had come over the usually mild-mannered, demure man. Hanzo wasn’t the kind to just snap at people like this; then again he also wasn’t usually plagued by headaches. She’d watched him rub his head no less than four times in the last hour that he’d been sitting there in the corner nursing his caramel double-shot.

As Hanzo forced his way out the front door, threatening to nearly run one of their patrons over, she looked at the owner who simply shrugged. Neither of them pretended to understand what went through his head anymore.

 _“That isn’t a good enough reason to hold someone! Suspicion of something I might have done, maybe, isn’t a charge! I don’t remember_ why _I know stuff but I know this shit isn’t_ legal!”

The last few weeks, the throbbing headaches and constant harassment of his first ‘new’ memories plagued his every waking moment. Ten years of being relatively able to cope with his problems and now it was as if the first few months of issues had begun to rear their ugly heads again. Why? Why _him?_ Why _now?_

Hanzo leaned against the subway pole, swaying lightly as the subway car sped along the track. He didn’t have too far to go and in the summer, he’d usually walk to work to avoid having to pay the subway fare but it was just too cold to do that now _and_ it was well on its way to icing the entire city’s power out.

It would make sense to just call in today but the Library was warm, full of the few people he would call his friends and always had food courtesy of Mondatta and Zenyatta, the two monks who ran the place. If there was anywhere in Philadelphia he’d want to get stuck at during the biggest storm predicted to hit the East Coast in a century, it was there. The library was tucked away in an unassuming historic building that had very nearly been lost to decay in the last few centuries. It wasn’t until two of the most unlikely of saviors showed up about ten years ago and turned the place into the beautiful period bank into a library-- complete with the original vault filled with literary classics-- and restored it to its former glory. 

He walked in, glancing around as he noticed that the other librarians were standing near the door with their bags in their hands, watching into the library as if they expected someone to come out of it. Hanzo walked over, still sipping his now long-chilled coffee and offered the frozen concoction to Mei as he also began to watch inside. Sure enough, the _very_ unofficial IT guy walked past cursing up a storm about something being broken. Again.

“What’s going on?” Hanzo asked, relieved when Mei took the beverage tray and all so he’d be free of it to watch the commotion.

“The computer Mondatta uses needs another motherboard.” Mei lamented, chewing on her lower lip in worry. “Max is trying to fix it but it’s expensive and we don’t know what is causing it.”

That was weird and an unfortunately common occurrence. Aberrant technical malfunctions were a daily reality when it came to the pair of Buddhist monks; no one had any idea what was going on save for the fact that they were exceedingly unlucky. It drove Max up a wall.

The young twenty-something charged with keeping the IT around here working stomped past again, flashes of red winking at them from the soles of his shoes and Hanzo had to take a second glance to make sure that he’d actually seen that correctly. The makeup had never struck Han as odd; he was Asian. If you’ve ever watched a music video out of Asia, particularly of the Korean variety, the men were wearing makeup all the time. The platinum white-blue hair hadn’t seemed at all strange either, it looked surprisingly good on Max despite the deep skin tone…

… but _that_ was new.

“Is he wearing heels?” Hanzo asked in a sort of bewildered disbelief. It wasn’t as if he cared what Max wore, he was an adult… at least the justice system thought he was. He’d been stationed here to perform more hours of community service than Hanzo was sure actually existed in a human lifespan. Max’d been working here to slave away at his community service sentencing for no less than a year and by all accounts, he wasn’t even halfway done.

“Oui,” Amélie replied, hands clasped around the handles of her purse as she looked on. “Louboutin. He has good taste.”

Hanzo opened his lips to dispute that but found that he couldn’t. He had no idea what good taste in shoes, clothes or otherwise was and if Amélie thought that the kid looked good… he probably did. “What’re they going to do about the computer?”

“I do not know.” The tall woman spoke, kicking off her own pair of tall heels before stealing his cold coffee right out of his hand and taking a sip. “I know that Max must work quickly… his parole officer is due to be here any moment.”

Well that explained the string of vehement cursing. Max had been sentenced for hacking his way into corporate secrets and while they could never _prove_ that he hadn’t sold them for a pretty penny, the now-adult did have quite the stash of funds socked away _somewhere_ if he could afford to buy sky-high heels and strut around in them in the middle of a blizzard. _“Merde..”_ Hanzo muttered under his breath, subtly checking the stoic woman for her reaction.

She didn’t disappoint. Amélie choked out a laugh at the abrupt cursing in her native language, shaking her head as the chuckles became less stifled and more enjoyed. “Mon chou, are you ever going to learn the rest of my language? Curses only get you so far.”

Hanzo gave her a sly smirk, stealing his coffee cup back to knock back the rest of it like a shot. “Curses will get me everywhere I need to be. Max taught me how to tell that old bag down the block how to go fuck herself in Italian and honestly, what else is there?” He gave a shrug, starting to back toward his desk. “Oi, Amélie, speaking of cabbages... Did you ever call back Lena? She’s the UPS girl--”

An elegant brow arched up, the woman tossing her long ponytail over her shoulder as she swept down and scooped her heels off the ground. “Is this the same UPS carrier with a girlfriend?”

“They’re not together anymore, at least as far as I can tell.”

“But they _were_ when she first hit on me.” Amélie sniffed, watching him sit down and begin to pull out the late books he’d need to mail out collections requests for. “That isn’t at all attractive.”

“I think Emily left her first because of how she’s always working overtime--” Hanzo started, raising an eyebrow at her as she sat down to her own desk at acquisitions.

“And what makes you think that I want to deal with that any more than… Emily?” Amélie wrinkled her nose in a distaste at how similar their names were to pronounce. That wasn’t exactly settling. “Besides, the answer is still no. I don’t need a reason to not want to date someone, Hanzo.”

He rolled his eyes and dropped his empty cup into the trash bin that sat beside his desk and started to boot up his computer when the lights flickered and something very _wrong_ happened to the screen. Instead of the usual boot up menu, there was a string of binary and then an error message.

‘Error: 404, The Cake is a Lie-- Linux Custom Pro, GHOST cannot be found.’

“Uh… Max?” Hanzo called, watching the petite Italian look up from where he was sitting with the tower in front of him on the counter in pieces and a screwdriver in each hand. “I think I broke it.”

“Youse guys are aboutta break _me.”_ The Newark native grumbled, cussing under his breath and rolling the chair back to go digging through his desk and look for his burned startup CD to reload the UI onto Hanzo’s computer for the third time this _week._ Just as Max began to walk across the floral Rococo Revival era carpet, the lights flickered again and this time when they went out they stayed out.  
  
If this was at all indicative of the way this day was going to go, Hanzo agreed with him.

_“You’re not a citizen, you’re a ward of the state. They’ll tell you that you’ve got rights but last time I checked, it’s your word against mine. Who’re they going to believe?”_

 

\--

 

One of these days, Hanzo was going to learn that when the monks say that the weather is getting too bad and they need to go home, he needed to listen and go home _then._ As it stood, he’d put off going home until the chill in the old bank had become too much. The parole officer had never showed, go figure, and almost all the employees were being booted out. The monks had turned the old back counting room into an apartment and so that much, at least, was warm and a text message on his phone told him that Ena had dropped the propane off at his apartment and tucked it just inside the door so it wouldn’t be stolen.

The problem was that right now he was looking at having to walk the next four city blocks home in a complete white-out without the right kind of protection for this. Max had been offered the spare bedroom with the monks, since he lived so far away and Mei had eagerly begun trekking about an hour previous but now Hanzo had to brave the storm and it was starting to get dark. He groaned, tucking his gloved hands into the shopping bags that Mondatta had provided--they matched the ones Zenyatta had suggested go in his shoes to make sure his feet didn’t get wet-- and pulled the borrowed towel up around his head so that snow wouldn’t go down his collar when the wind blowed.

Hindsight tended to be 20/20 and his new view looked like he should have called in this morning. The whole thing was quickly becoming an absolute disaster. He tucked his arms around his waist tightly, trying to keep warm in the winter coat even as the blowing snow started to soak through the woolen outside. When he’d picked it out, Hanzo had chosen the peacoat for how smart it looked when he wore it on the usually tame winter days. Now, a few years and more than his fair share of snowstorms later, Hanzo would be the first to tell you that the ugly puffy coats were by far the better idea. Fashion be damned.

“Ugh..” Han groaned and started to trudge his way through the snow and ice on his path back home, looking out over the street. There was not a single soul out right now, strange as that was here in Philly, the whole street had almost become some kind of barren wasteland that had been abandoned to the ice. Not a single person to be found except for him, as poetic as it was. Hanzo’d never known, or at least he didn’t remember, anywhere else but this town and this place… Alone in the world, unable to see the way forward and no way to turn back.

“You’re getting sappy in your old age.” Han murmured to himself, continuing through the thick drifts stubbornly. Even though this walk would usually take him no more than 20 minutes, Hanzo knew he had to of been out here at the very least 30 already and he wasn’t even quite certain if he’d made it halfway yet. The wind and the snow made things that wouldn’t have seemed odd at all without them into something of nightmares.

Such as the sudden rustling and yelling off to his left in the alleyway. Usually, he wouldn’t have even turned his head but he found himself moving down the alley to try and help whatever poor soul was presumably being mugged back here. The first thing that living in a large city on the East Coast had taught him was that it was usually ill-advised to step in between a mugger and their victim. _Especially_ any mugger desperate to work in these kinds of conditions. As Hanzo came around that corner he was _certain_ that he was going to live to regret this decision.

Nothing could have prepared him for what he’d find.

Wings as long as a bus, the colors muted by the snow but they appeared to be striped in black and white with a rusty red top that for a moment, Hanzo worried might have been blood. This was all too familiar, the creature injured and passed out cold in the snow..

An alley, an angel, a _mistake_ that he refused make a second time.

So when he turned his eyes to look at what had downed this creature, this angel that had to be his otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to see it if the stories were to be believed, and saw figures clad in black and wielding swords… Hanzo just reacted.

It wasn’t as if he had any idea where the ability came from, it appeared to be some kind of leftover instinct from whatever and whoever he used to be. As they ran for the angel laying with his wing bent at an awkward angle and hat lying forgotten in the snow, Hanzo ran for them. His body moved naturally, ducking a slice to catch the first assailant by the wrist and wrench the weapon away. Before he could stop it, Hanzo had turned that same sword on the black-clad figure and sliced through the gut.

To his horror, what seeped out was anything but blood. Blood might have been easier to work with and certainly blood would have been considerably less disturbing than the thick, inky substance that spilled into the freshly fallen powder. _“Nani ga fu-”_

Time for gawking quickly came to an end when one of the others swiped their sword at him. Again, memories flashing of another place with sakura blossoms and a huge bell-- ryu and torii and _Hanamura_ and--

Too much reminiscing about suddenly reclaimed memories and not enough protecting his ass. Hanzo barely ducked the next swing in time, feeling the wind against his face as it swung past and he turned on his heel to counterattack. More of the ink-like substance fell and this time the slice was deeper and the attacker quite honestly dissolved into more of the goo. What _were_ these things?

Guardian Angels were one of the biggest mysteries of the modern age: Where did they come from? What were they? Were they really as benevolent as they seemed? Did they live a life of solitude until they were assigned a human? Were they actually assigned humans or was that some kind of strange biology thing?

Were they even real?

In the midst of all those questions, a litany of ‘where’, ‘what’, ‘who’, and ‘why’, the real question that ought to have been asked and hadn’t was ‘were there things out there that weren’t angels?’ More importantly, ‘are they friendly?’

If you’re wondering, things other than angels do exist and the answer is a solid _‘no,_ they are _not friendly.’_

They also weren’t terribly good at sword fighting, despite coming up against an angel with katana of all things. However it was that they’d managed to fell the fallen guardian--Hanzo didn’t know how you’d manage that with just a sword-- he was winning this fight by a landslide. Dodging came like breathing, the steps felt well rehearsed and the sword weight in the palm was like coming home again. For a moment, Hanzo worried that if he sliced himself it would also bleed ink. Certainly, that would make sense of the night terrors.

When it became clear that they couldn’t win against him--not even that they weren’t winning, they were _losing_ in battle and numbers--the creatures began to retreat. They seemed humanoid, though Hanzo couldn’t see their faces. More disturbingly, they seemed to walk into a shadow and just vanish into thin air...but now wasn’t the time to think about that. The snowfall had only gotten worse and this angel was out here in nothing more than a pair of jeans, cowboy boots, and a button-down. He was going to freeze to death at this rate.

 _‘No. I’m not doing this again. I_ won’t _do this again.’_  

Hanzo wasn’t about to lose another angel. Not today; never again. So he quickly peeled off his outer coat and pulled the angel’s arms through it from the front, trying to fold his wings in the best that they could be folded in before pulling the warm man into his arms and starting to haul him toward the apartment. If it hadn’t been so fucking _cold_ he might have paid more attention to what the angel actually looked like but at the moment, his only thought was getting him back to the apartment building and then _somehow_ pulling this heavy avian hybrid creature up all four flights to his apartment.

Doesn’t matter how hard it is, he had to do it. This was his angel and he’d be damned if he lost another one.


	2. Leave one wolf alive and the sheep are never safe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Leave one wolf alive and the sheep are never safe." Arya Stark

It turns out, trying to drag a fully grown man _with wings_ up _four flights of_ _stairs_ was a pipe dream no matter how many leg days Hanzo refused to miss. To be fair, the huge man wasn’t nearly as heavy as he would have originally imagined for reasons that Han could only guess at but it didn’t matter if he weighed two-hundred some odd pounds or one-hundred some, the wings were still huge and ungainly and impossible to control in this tiny corridor. Like it or not, he’d have to call for help in order to haul the man up the stairs.  
  
_"What do you mean, you_ found _an angel?”_ Amélie’s voice drifted over the speakerphone, the sound of her begrudgingly huffing and puffing coming over as well as the crunching of fresh snow and the howling of the wind. She lived the closest and, while neither of them would admit to it, they were closely knit friends. 6 years of taking most of their classes together would do that; like it or not, Ph.D candidates became either the closest of friends or the worst of enemies. She and Hanzo were both.

“Exactly what it sounds like.” Hanzo bit out, bouncing down the stairs to the bottom where he’d left the man. For a split-second, he was afraid that the angel had somehow slipped from his grasp but no-- the man had just curled up tighter and started to shiver. Hanzo’s lips pursed in concern, taking in the blue skin but he knew that shivers actually meant the hypothermia was getting better instead of worse. “I found an angel and I need your help to get him up the stairs.”

 _“Why couldn’t you call someone else?!”_ Well, it was safe to say that she was pissed off, though he couldn’t exactly blame her. The largest storm the East Coast had seen in 40 years was on its way in and the last thing a dame as sylphlike as her wanted to be doing was trudging through the snow right now. This was the sort of wet chill that blew right through every layer of clothing and settled straight into a person’s bones.

He grit his teeth and turned as if that would make his hushed words more discreet, though there was no one but the angel in question there to hear them. “Because it doesn’t seem to matter how big of a _bitch_ you are, you don’t run your mouth. I need discretion and I know you can provide that.” He also needed her ballet-hardened legs. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise; ballerinas were _tough_ and Amélie could still leg-press more than he could--not that it mattered at this point. Considering how much he worked out to keep the physique that he’d woken up with, Hanzo still couldn’t get the angel much further than a few steps before a wing got in the way or the dead weight slipped from his grasp.

_“Tch. You need better friends, mon chou.”_

“Gee, what a revelation.” Hanzo grit his teeth and tucked the angel under the large comforter that he’d pulled off his bed and tried to figure out how to fold the wings up tighter to the man’s body. He didn’t know if anything was broken, he didn’t know the first thing about angelic anatomy; this whole matter was a clusterfuck. “When are you going to be here?”

 _“I’ve only been walking for 3 minutes.”_ Amélie drawled, clearly unimpressed by his extreme lack of patience. _“Put your big boy panties on and wait.”_

Hanzo rolled his eyes with a disgusted noise, looking down as his phone chimed that she’d hung up on him. What a bitch, though that was why they got along so well. He wasn’t exactly a paragon of patience and understanding himself. His eyes moved to rest on the angel’s face where he laid in the corridor. Eyebrows tipped up in pain, downward-turned lips red and chapped from the wind… The hat had been lost at some point but he’d rather lose the ratty stetson and save the man. The angel had a beard that grew in full enough to make Hanzo seethe with anger. Even at 30--or so his doctors thought he was 30-ish--Hanzo hadn’t been able to grow a beard in fully. His cheeks stubbornly refused to grow much more than patchy face-pubes. Even if Amélie and Max hadn’t thrown a fit, he would have still shaved them off.

His hair was a long, unkempt and ratty chestnut. Thick and coarse chest hair poked out from the button-up brown shirt that had no business being out in that weather and ran along the burly arms. Honestly, if it weren’t for the high quality cowboy boots and the _wings,_ Hanzo would have thought he was homeless. He didn’t dare uncover him out here in the wind-swept hallway where the gusts of frigid air blew in from the doorway; the poor thing already had his teeth chattering.

“Someone save me from these dying angels.” Hanzo murmured to himself, sitting down on the dingy 70’s geometric print carpet and tucked himself under the blanket with the angel to try and warm him up. The same filthy mind that allowed him to write trashy fanfiction whispered that he was supposed to be naked for this to work, the man jamming that thought down back to the gutter it came from. This was the real world, not a shitty slash fic.

The angel didn’t seem to be waking and that worried Hanzo. He recognized that this man had taken quite the brutal beating from those ink creatures and he had no way to know if there was internal bleeding or serious trauma. It scared him to think about--what if he couldn’t help _another_ angel? It was just his reoccurring nightmare all over again. This time he’d turned around to save the fallen creature, only to find out that it was already too late.

Hanzo frantically tilted his head back and blinked up, staring at the bits of insect in the ancient flickering globe light above his head as his sight fogged up. Crying here would be _shameful._ What if the angel woke up and saw it? Some shitty savior he turned out to be, tearing up in the hall after failing to even get the angel to the second floor. _‘What am I doing with my life--?’_

Were angels warmer than humans? Was he supposed to feel this warm? What if he was sick? Hanzo’s anxiety-fueled brain ran a mile a minute. What if the angel needed medical attention? Would he get in trouble for not calling the cops immediately?

 _“Merde,_ Hanzo.” Amélie’s voice knocked him out of his thoughts as she stepped in and started to stomp the snow from her leather boots. Those suckers made about as much sense as Max’s Louboutin heels because they couldn’t be keeping her feet warm. “You look pathetic.”

“Thanks, I feel pathetic too.” Hanzo snorted, pulling himself out from under the blanket before drawing up to his full height… still an accursed couple of centimeters shorter than her. “He’s cold, I need to take him up to my apartment.”

“Your… fourth floor apartment?” Amélie asked in disbelief, flicking her eyes from Hanzo’s grim expression of determination to the shivering angel on the floor. How _exactly_ did he expect the pair of them to pull that off? “That’s a lot of man to just… haul up four stories. Even with two of us. I’m not sure this has occurred to you--we’re not exactly equipped to move heavy payloads.”

Hanzo sent a scathing glower in her direction, attempting to wrap the angel up in the blanket more securely. The whole thing was a wet, frigid disaster--not unlike the pair preparing to carry it--and to make it worse, the wings didn’t quite want to fold completely. Every time they managed to get them folded, the angel would groan and then unfurl the wing once again. “I don’t think we’re going to get this to work in any easy capacity. We’re just going to have to lift the blanket like a stretcher and hope.”

“Do you have a god for this?” Amélie questioned dryly, tightening the straps on her gloves before grabbing handfuls of the fluffy blanket in tandem with Hanzo even as he attempted to bore through her forehead with his eyes. He had no patience for her pedantic humor on a good day, today he had even less than usual.

 _“Lift. Him.”_ He hissed harshly, eyes narrowed. She answered his annoyance with her usual apathetic torpor.

_“Ichi… ni.. san!”_

 

xx

 

Business at the shop had, predictably, slowed down due to the massive snowstorm. Ena had sent Fareeha home early in a feeble attempt to shelter her from the brunt of it. It had been a mistake to leave the shop open after noon. Though the storm had not been forecasted to arrive before three in the afternoon, the premature arrival of heavy snow should have clued him into a potential hazard. Halháta was nothing if not stubborn in his insistence of leaving the shop open as long as possible.

Mahogany eyes stared wistfully out the front windows as flurries stuck to the aged brick facade across the street and likewise began to pile up along the base of his shop front. Ena had stalled out in his after-hours clean up, staring out at the blizzard threatening to swallow all of Philadelphia--if not the entire East Coast--in snow with his chin propped up on the handle of his push broom. The snow was deceptively soft looking; it resembled clouds as the wind distributed it in perfect slopes up to the edges of the street.

There hadn’t been a single soul passing by this shop in over an hour, if not longer than that as the snowfall became so thick that it was nearly impossible to discern the words on the awning just across the street. ‘Peaceful.’ He thought to himself. The snow reminded him of home in ways he’d rather not think about, as home wasn’t someplace he could ever return. That was the nature of moving so far away: one always begins to yearn for a home that isn’t there and a time that will never return.

Ena shook his head, beginning to brush the melting snow back toward the front door before cursing himself. He should have gotten the mop rather than the broom for this mess, the heating in his shop was already starting to melt it. “This wasn’t one of my smarter ideas.” He muttered, stretching out to ease the pain between his shoulders and turned back to trade out for the right tool. Halháta had barely passed over the threshold into the back room to gather up his mop and bucket when he heard a heavy thump against the wall adjoining the store room with the back stairwell.

“What… the hell?” He murmured to himself, bewildered and abandoned the idea of cleaning for a moment. His first concern was that the ever self-flagellating tenant had collapsed and rolled down the stairs… his second concern was that he was liable for whatever injuries Hanzo might have sustained.

To be fair, Ena tried to be an upstanding citizen but his internal dialogue was almost always somewhat pragmatic.

There was a little-known backdoor into the unused hallway that ran behind the front shops and connected the stairwell and the uninhabited apartments on the first floor. Whoever had built the original building in the late 1880’s had even gone through the care of disguising the door from the other side by including wallpaper and trim. Ena’s father had repeated that decision when he’d begun renovating, so the door nearly vanished behind him as he exited.

What Halháta expected to find in no way prepared him for what he actually found. Lo and behold, Hanzo and femme fatale friend were attempting to haul a man up the stairs and _failing spectacularly._

...and they clearly didn’t realize he was here.

“I’m sick of carrying this all by myself!” Amélie snarled, a visible flush and sweat collecting on her forehead as she heaved the blanket up the stairs only to slide the angel down to nearly knock Hanzo off his feet. They’d only managed to make it halfway to the second floor and the entire situation would be far more entertaining if it weren’t for the fact that there was an _unconscious person just sitting there._

Most people dismissed the existence of angels as readily as they dismissed the idea of an omnipotent God. They had been documented throughout history but so had ghosts and dragons--neither of which existed. There was no evidence that angels were real and yet...

“Do you not see me over here carrying him? You’re not doing anything! If you’re just going to keep throwing--”  
  
“Excuse you, I am not _throwing_ anything _yet.”_ Amélie’s hands shook with the effort required not to just let go of the blanket and let his darwinian fate run its course.  
  
“‘Yet’?!”  
  
As genuinely fascinating as watching the pair of them squabble was, they weren’t going to get anything done so long as they were more occupied with who was carrying more weight rather than assessing the situation and changing tactics. Ena would have to handle his shock later, right now there was an injured and shivering young man in his stairwell that was dangerously close to careening down the steps to the bottom.

“Perhaps if you both switched--” Ena spoke up, trying to alert them to his presence and offer a different solution to the problem. Surely they’d realized that this wasn’t going to work?

“I’m not switching anything, this is working fine. If she’d just do her part, we’d already have him up the stairs by now.” Hanzo snarled over his shoulder at Ena just as Amélie echoed the sentiment only with Hanzo at fault. It seemed to take both of them a solid 3 seconds of staring at each other with a dumbstruck expression before they realized that someone had seen them and their precious cargo.

 _“Merde!”_ Amélie shrieked, the blanket sliding through her fingers as she nearly jumped right out of her skin. The last thing they’d expected to see was the landlord, of all people. The curse was echoed mere moments later as Hanzo struggled to catch the heavy angel without falling down the stairs himself while Amélie scrambled to try and support the heavy wings at least. “What is he doing here?! Did you call him?”

“No!” Han just couldn’t catch a break today. He was teetering dangerously on the edge of the stair with one arm around the angel’s waist and the other gripping the already suspiciously loose railing for dear life. “I’m not an idiot--” His snow-covered boot slipped slightly and it sent Hanzo lurching forward in a desperate bid not to fall down to the next floor. “Kuso!”  
  
Halháta found himself moving on autopilot to catch Hanzo before he could fall, giving him a steadying hand to the shoulders while reaching around to get his other arm around the angel’s chest just beneath his arm. “Hanzo, this isn’t going to work. Let’s back him back down to the landing. Just one step at a time. One… two..”  
  
The three of them slowly moved the burly angel down the stairs and then laid him down. “Did you both really think about this before you decided to move him?” Ena asked, beginning to fold the shivering creature's arms in and then tucked the blanket around him. The way both of them turned to frown at opposite walls was more than sufficient to answer his question with a firm ‘no’. Halháta stood up and headed back toward the back door to the shop. It was rather convenient that the door opened right up into the store room as he could just reach inside and steal a pair of sturdy wooden mop handles and a couple coils of rope. It would take a good few minutes to fashion a sort of stretcher but it could be done.  
  
“Is this a Native American thing?” There was her ever-curious, if tactless, thirst for information. Had he not been so frustrated with the pair of them, Ena would have answered the woman seriously. As it stood, they were already attempting a gargantuan feat with near barbarism and he was concerned for the angel. Something had clearly beat him halfway to oblivion and their careless behavior certainly wouldn’t help anything here. 

"Why would you ask him if it was a Native American thing?! Is that a French thing?" Hanzo balked.

“It’s an EMT thing.” As a barista, few people knew or cared that he’d actually studied to be an emergency responder. A real stretcher instead of poles and rope, a real neck brace instead of his jacket rolled up and tied up haphazardly, a second _paramedic_ instead of the _nervous wreck_ of a student would be ideal but he had to work with what was available. Hanzo hovered nearby in concern rather than leaning against the wall like Amélie was doing. Halháta bit his tongue so as not to allow his bristling to lash out at the undeserving Japanese man.

The angel had to be tied securely into the blanket to keep his wings from flopping around and then the entire bundle was secured to the makeshift stretcher so as not to slide off again. “Alright, Hanzo… you get the other side. Lift with your legs.” He instructed, squatting down to get ahold of the handles of the stretcher. “We’re just going to test the strength of it first.” The wooden handles he used were industrial strength so… he hoped they’d hold up to the weight of a fully grown man.

Only one way to find out.

He counted down slowly and at one, Hanzo and he hesitantly began to lift. The rods bowed and caused a sweat matching Hanzo’s own to break on Ena’s forehead. “Hanzo, you go up first because you're the shortest and I will go up behind you. We’re going to try and keep the angel as level as possible, but be careful--I don’t want these rods to break.” Because _that_ would be a disaster.

"Amélie, hold up the middle." Hanzo instructed, getting into position.

“Yeah, whatever.” She muttered, watching the pair of them start up the stairs and jammed her shoulder up beneath their load.

It was touch and go for a while, a few slips or moments where a break needed to be had when the weight became too much to hold but the angel was lifted up to the top floor. “What I don’t understand is,” Hanzo muttered as he unlocked his modest apartment and held the door open with his foot while they carried the man in, “How does someone so heavy fly?”

“Fly? What...? Uh... Magic, I guess?” Halháta answered, lowering the man to the ground in time with the other man.

“Magic isn’t real.” Amélie sniffed as she retrieved a nasty-looking pocket knife from her bag and began to cut the angel free of the rope contraption.

"Of course magic is real," Hanzo groaned, stretching to get some knots out of his back. "Has to be, the guy has  _wings."_

He paled significantly, cinnamon eyes flicking over to meet Hanzo’s dark pair. “Is it common to just always… keep a random knife on your person?” Hanzo only shrugged in answer; It _was_ West Philly so perhaps it wasn’t quite as outlandish as it seemed. “Whatever, it’s not important right now-- Is it really so outlandish to think that magic might be at work here?” Halháta’s voice had risen a couple of octaves as he watched her look magic in the face and deny its existence.

“Yes. It’s just another species of humanoid. It’s not magic, it’s science. How we know that it’s not just some unethical government experiment?” Amélie looked back over her shoulder with a scowl. “They do terrible things to good people all the time and no one ever hears about it.”

Ena just looked at Hanzo as if the man might somehow have an explanation, gaping without words.

“It’s a miracle,” Hanzo drawled, dropping his messenger bag in the corner and began to walk closer to regard the angel in better detail now that they weren’t being threatened by a cold gust of wind every other moment. “There is someone who can render Ena speechless.”

“Shut up, you.” The EMT turned barista grumbled, crossing his arms. “This whole day has gone from bad to worse and I don’t need you making fun of me too.” He knelt beside Hanzo to try and check for broken bones while Amélie turned the knife on that obnoxious plaid monstrosity with a scary precision.

Stripping down the man and getting him warm was a given. They were all intelligent enough, and some might argue mature enough though they knew better, to keep quiet about anything they found beneath. The wings were difficult to work around but they didn’t seem to be broken in any regard. There were bruises and various injuries that sluggishly bled through the slight blue tinting of skin. As Hanzo fought with redressing their avian guest in warm fleece pajama pants and thick socks, Halháta dressed the wounds.

Once he was finally settled onto the outstretched futon couch, they ensured he was covered well and that the modest propane heater was turned up as high as it would go.

“Are you going to be alright?” Ena asked softly, not sure that he wanted Hanzo alone with a potential unknown like this. There was no way to know if the man would be friendly when he woke up.

“Hai. Don’t worry about me.” Hanzo returned quietly, gesturing to Amélie who had recently returned from the bathroom clothed in one of Hanzo’s spare t-shirts and drawstring silk pajama pants. The pair of them stood near the door speaking in low murmurs to avoid waking the angel though it was entirely possible that not even a foghorn would rouse him now. They’d very nearly dumped him down the stairs without so much as a groan.

“I can’t help it,” A small expression of fond concern passed over the young features and his eyes flicked up to check the angel once more as if he were convinced at any time the man could rouse and attack someone. “You don’t even know this guy and you’re both gonna be in here alone with him.” As much as Ena could be antagonistic toward Amélie, he also worried for her in this situation. Some part of him knew she could take care of herself as well as Hanzo could but that didn’t change his instinct to protect them both.

“Your concern is flattering but unneeded.” Hanzo assured him, at least cracking a small smile.

“If… you’re sure…” Halháta’s lips twisted up tighter as he had to force himself to back away from the situation and leave it in their hands. “I’ll just be downstairs in my apartment. If you need _anything,_ just call.”

“I will.” It took a few more assurances before the reluctant landlord could finally be pushed out of the flat and Hanzo could sink into the loveseat beside Amélie despite her scathing remarks about his fat ass taking up the entire chair.

It was going to be a long night.

 

Xx

 

As a general rule, doors and windows shouldn’t rattle with such ferocity.

The ordeal of the day along with a general state of exhaustion that winter brought over its unwilling constituents took its toll even on even the most steadfast of individuals. Hanzo had put the footrest up on the loveseat and proceeded to stream videos on what was left of his phone battery until the pair of them had fallen asleep there.

It wasn’t the first time he’d fallen asleep in the armchair and not made it to bed and it likely wouldn’t be the last; it wasn’t even the first time he’d fallen asleep with Amélie there either. They’d passed out on many a floor in their studies together. It was regrettable that he was so very gay as she would have made for a lovely wife, had he been interested in that kind of thing. It wasn’t as if he knew his old self however, there was a chance he’d already married a beard. No way to know.  
  
They slept side by side, Amélie having turned away to make more room and breathed evenly with one arm draped over outside their shared quilt. Hanzo rested as easily as possible, able to ignore the chill of his left shoulder exposed to the air as he snoozed rather peacefully. In this half-awareness, he found himself wondering whatever had happened to her beau. A few months ago, Gérard had been in some kind of terrible accident that left him brain dead and on every machine medicine had to offer, but she’d never told him the circumstances surrounding what was essentially death--though he had never asked. He should've asked.

The howling of the wind that still blowed brutally outside the window would occasionally cause the old windows to whistle but the rattling was more than usual. His apartment was never particularly warm but this was more than even the usual chill. He was starting to see his breath.  
  
_‘This storm is starting to get ridiculous.’_ In the bleary uncertainty of half-sleep, he pulled the blanket back from the barely protesting dancer and rolled onto his side so they were back to back. It was warm here, warmer than it would have been in his bed and he was loathe to leave it even if Amélie _did_ steal blankets like a fiend.

There would be no sleeping until the source of the cold air was located. He pulled himself out of the recliner with an ungainly shifting, such as was required to get out of a chair like that without putting down the footrest, and grabbed a nearby robe. The first thing he wanted to do was check on the angel. The premise of this being ‘his’ angel had vanished quickly after Amélie had also been able to see the man. Most of the myths and legends said that only one person could see their guardian angel but it was starting to look less like they were divine creatures and more like another species. It was only a working theory; a _barely_ working theory but a theory. Part of Hanzo hated to admit that he was excited at having a second chance at an angel. The rest of him was relieved.

He ran a hand through his tangled hair, attempting to get the quickly chilling fingers to at  least make him somewhat presentable as he moved to his futon couch. They’d laid it out to accommodate the large angel wings, and it seemed that the man was still in the same position they’d left him in. Ena and he had managed to put the man on his stomach so that the wings weren’t pinned beneath his weight.  
  
Hanzo sighed, pulling the thick blankets over the angel once more. The occasional flapping of wings, usually paired with curses or jerking of the angel himself, proved at least to Hanzo that it wasn’t a coma. He’d likely wake in the morning, or that was the hope. A harsh gust of wind through the nearest window caused him to stop and shudder. How had that widow come open?

The problem with these old buildings was that sometimes doors would come open, windows would appear shut but not be, the pipes would groan and creak; essentially anything that was nightmare inducing happened here. Hanzo had begun to jokingly name his ghosts in lieu of becoming aggravated with the architecture.  
  
“Ah, ah. I’m coming, Bob.” He murmured to himself as he moved toward the only quit that was moving. That movement meant it had to be the window that was open. “Don’t get impatient.”

So he pulled back the quilt to shut the window and the reason the window was open suddenly became abundantly clear.

He backpedaled so fast that the curtain rod holding his quilt in place threatened to come right out of the wall when he realized one of those ink creatures, clad in black, was attempting to _get into_ his apartment. This close to one, he realized that they didn’t have _faces._ It was as if someone had taken a silicon mat and stretched it over the bone structure of a person. It was almost surreal to be this close to one of them, so much so that he forgot himself for a moment. Well, until it reached out for him.

With an inhuman scream, the creature took a swing at him and Hanzo reached up before he could quite get his bearings, grabbing the frame on the window and shoving it down onto the creature. The thing’s scream became more of a pained wail and Hanzo fell back away from it, ripping down the quilt he had over his window in the process. How was this not waking up Amélie? The angel sort of made sense, it hadn’t woken up and they’d drug it up three flights of stairs, but Amélie? It wasn’t computing.

It didn’t matter.

The creature was squirming and letting out a litany of ear piercing noises, swiping its ‘hands’ at him as they transformed into nasty looking claws. A million things passed in his head in the span of a split second before Hanzo turned over and scrambled toward the small kitchen in his apartment, nearly falling on his face as the quilt beneath him wrapped around his legs. All those things swarming through his mind and the one he settled on was that this thing had to die. It couldn’t be allowed to get back to whatever had sent it and give away his position.

Later, he might even worry about just how cold-blooded that decision was but right now he was more concerned with protecting his people. Amélie, Ena, even that angel passed out on his couch. That thing could not be allowed to walk away from here. 

Taking the largest knife he could find easily out of the block on the counter, Hanzo turned around to stare this thing down. It had a mouth… sort of. It was very clearly shrieking however the jaw that moved along with those noises was covered over in skin. His target was that first.  
He _lunged._

Hanzo grabbed the creature by the wrist and twist that away from him so that he would have an opening before driving the huge chef’s cleaver into the place where a mouth should have been, ripping that skin open. Lo and behold behind that skin this thing had _teeth._ Nasty, sharp, yellowed fangs that snapped at his hand, even with the knife down his throat. Hanzo pulled the blade back and thrust it forward again to dig it into where an eye should have been, according to the bone structure. That was when it finally showed true pain. The black inky-blood gushed forth from this new injury as the unheld claw dug at Hanzo but he couldn’t feel it in the cloud of fight-or-flight. He snarled, letting go of the wrist to grab this thing around the head and thrust the cleaver up through the trachea. 

The screams finally stopped.  
  
“You listen to me and you listen _carefully--”_ Hanzo snarled, pulling back and opening the window to kick the creature out onto his fire escape where he’d be able to finish the job.  “--you and yours will _never_ return here again.” He followed out and with another harsh kick, the being tumbled over the railing and down… down to the alley below where it hit a dumpster and folded in half before sliding off and hitting the ground.  
  
It was in that moment that Hanzo realized how cold he was. The adrenaline had been keeping him warm but it was gone now leaving only tremors and abstract horror. The surge of power had left as quickly as the creature had fallen to the earth below, now Hanzo could only wonder what he would do _now._ He went back inside and closed the window, shakily putting the quilt back up in position to keep the chill out and headed for the shower to get this cleaned off.  
  
He dropped the knife into the bathroom sink, barely registering the sound of steel on porcelain as he stripped down and stepped into the ugly 60’s style tub. His vision was foggy on the edges and his head had begun to throb, it was almost like the early days of coming out of his amnesia in the way that his world spun. Usually, a nap would be the only thing that could fix this, but luckily he’d be heading for bed soon anyway.  
  
He didn’t even register that he was falling until he’d already hit the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys, so sorry this took forever to get out. I've been doing homework and I played Subnautica which... devoured several days of my time... But I finished!


	3. The past beats inside me like a second heart.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The past beats inside me like a second heart." - John Banville, The Sea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I missed you guys <3

“Stop moving around so much.” Amélie’s annoyed voice filtered in through his subconscious, an impact with his shoulder--a shove-- and then warm breath over the back of his neck. At first, off tempo and the breathing settled into an even in and out warming his hair and tickling the back of his ears. At some point she must have rolled over to spoon up to the other body in the chair beside her and that was perfectly acceptable to him. It was entirely too cold in this place to be laying anywhere alone.

The house was silent save for the steady snoring on the futon from the angel that had flipped over in his sleep and the soft  _ whoosh _ from a steady ignition of propane fuel in the wall mounted heater. The steady rumble of the ancient HVAC system was noticeably missing, as was the soft clicking of his electric grandfather clock in the corner. That meant that the power had eventually died at some point in the night, so sleeping anywhere but the living room would have been bust anyway. If the electricity was off, that meant there was no hot water for a shower this morning.

_ ‘Kuso…’ _ One of his only true pleasures in life was the hot shower that he indulged in every morning and even that had been taken away by the whims of Philadelphia in December. Hanzo shuddered violently as he pulled the thick quilt back and shimmied off the loveseat and then gently tucked Amélie back in while she grumbled about losing her personal heater. Hanzo smiled despite himself. She would have made a lovely wife.

With the furnace out for the count, he needed to check and make sure that Soba was warm in his tank. Hanzo stretched, scratching idly at his beard where the closely trimmed portions had grown out overnight and begun to cause his face to itch before walking idly toward the warm glass enclosure that had begun to sweat. He plucked the black thermometer from the top of the cage, taking care not to pull the wires too much. Seventy-nine point seven degrees fahrenheit, perfectly regulated. Even though the power had gone out, Hanzo had a daisy-chained set of car batteries attached to a regulator which allowed him to recharge them while the power was on. Soba would be safe for at least a couple of days. He pulled the heavy-duty quilted insulator over the tank and made sure that the tubes connected to the air pump could still bring in fresh oxygen for the lone freshwater dragonfish.

With that done, and his feet already starting to get cold, Hanzo headed for his bedroom to retrieve his house shoes and brush his teeth. There was only one bathroom in his tiny apartment but it suited him well enough. He only really needed one, if you thought about it. The man stopped into the bathroom and grabbed his toothbrush from the spot-less porcelain sink before starting to scrub his teeth while searching around his cold room for his houseshoes. They were usually sat beside the door to his bedroom, however Hanzo quickly realized that they weren’t where they belonged. Usually that meant they’d been kicked off elsewhere in the apartment.

With the shoes temporarily forgotten his next goal was to feed himself and Amélie along with the angel if he woke. Hanzo continued moving around, walking back out into the warmer portion of the apartment to head for the kitchen. Most of his food would be starting to defrost in the freezer… luckily enough, Hanzo had an entire fire escape presumably buried in snow to hide his perishable goods in. Handy for the food if not for the people in Philly stuck in this cold. He wandered slowly onto the cold linoleum floor, checking the calendar affixed to the fridge with a Pachimari magnet.

_ ‘Happy Hump day.’  _ Hanzo mused to himself with a chuckle, crossing the 9th of his calendar along with the 8th that he’d forgotten to cross off the day previous. Honestly, Wednesdays were harder for him than anything else because they reminded him that he was halfway to the weekend--another weekend with no plans and nowhere to go. He moved again, walking past his front door and realized his house shoes were still sitting beside it… and that there was a puddle.

“Oh come  _ on.” _ Hanzo groaned, rubbing his face and grabbing a nearby hand towel to start sopping up the water. They must have tracked snow in the night before and it had melted into a dirty puddle beside his coat rack. Fucking nasty, was that a  _ bug? _ The man went to slide on his house shoes and had already kicked the sopping slippers right back off. They’d soaked up all the water at the door that had melted under them and now were unfit for him to wear. “Ugh…” He wrinkled his nose and reached down while picking them up by the tips of his fingers.

Now the question was where to put them? He couldn’t put them outside to dry out, they’d only freeze solid. Besides that, if he just let them dry they would still be dirty and unfit for wear. Hanzo made another put-upon groan before wandering back to the bathroom to drop them into his tub and start to rinse them down. The water was cold as  _ sin. _ By the time he finished rinsing off the slippers and hanging them up to dry, Hanzo had lost the feeling in his fingers and they were an unnatural shade of blue.

He let out a shuddering breath into the frigid bathroom and watched the air fog ever so slightly. The apartment was situated on a corner so his front room, bedroom and bathroom all had outside walls and Hanzo was starting to seriously doubt the amount of insulation between the tub and the outside brick. It was always cold in here but  _ holy fuck. _

He spat out the toothpaste and rinsed his mouth out in the sink on the way by before dropping the toothbrush back into its holder. By the way the late-night conspiracists spoke about his case, one would think that Hanzo was some fascinating personality but it turns out that he brushed his teeth and pissed in the morning just like anyone else.

Nothing to see here.

Hanzo returned to his bedroom and pulled on a few pairs of thick socks to account for his lack of slippers along with a second pair of pants over his first set and a the thick sweater Mei had knitted him the previous Christmas.

_ ‘Shit, Christmas!’ _ Hanzo cursed to himself as he remembered the American holiday that was so important at his job. They always had a Secret Santa and this year it was his turn to buy something for Max and he had no idea what to get the resident fashionista. Or was it fashionisto? Was that a thing?

Chewing over all this in his head, Hanzo returned to the kitchen while tying his robe around his waist while trying to decide what to make for breakfast. He tended toward a more traditional Japanese breakfast of fish and soup but Amélie was here and that meant he needed to make something she would eat. The ballerina had never been a fan of miso and rice would cause her to bloat up too much. It wasn’t as if he forced her to eat it but she would complain as if he’d held her at gunpoint and shoved it down her throat.

So he settled on making eggs and bacon along with some orange supremes. It took a moment to pull a couple of skillets out and start the bacon but soon enough the apartment was filling with the scent of cooking meat. Surely as the sun rose in the east, Amélie woke from her slumber when greeted with the scent of bacon. She was as predictable as she was a pain in his ass; both of those were positive traits, ask anyone.

“Ohayo.” Hanzo chuckled, pulling a knife from his full counter block to start carving the skin off his orange so it could be supremed into perfect wedges.

“Bonjour,” Amélie yawned, accent thicker than normal in the early morning as she rubbed her face and leaned up against the counter where he was working--threatening to get her long black hair in the oranges he’d started to slice.

“Oi! Back up,  _ Imouto. _ You’re going to get hair in the food.” He grumped, effectively warding her back with a wave of his hand.

She rolled her eyes with a haughty huff, settling on the other foot to instead lean on the counter with her hip so as to protect his workspace from the dastardly threat of stray keratin. “If you cut yourself, I will laugh,  _ Mon chou.” _

“I’ll have you know,” Hanzo sniffed, “I know my way around a knife. I will not cut myself.”

“Mmhmm. You said that last time too.”

She didn’t need to know that the last time he’d cut himself it was because of an unbidden memory of slicing into something less innocent than fish. No one needed to know about that. “Yes well,” Hanzo shrugged and tilted his nose into the air, “This time I mean it.”

“Of course you do,  _ chou chou.” _ He didn’t need to look at her to know she was smirking. Amélie had the most insufferable way of worming under anyone’s skin. Try as he might, Hanzo was not immune.

They fell into a companionable silence. Amélie began to adjust the bacon from time to time, with her arm bumping his shoulder and vice versa in an easy exchange that came from years of friendship. It got so calm that when a sudden and loud rapping on the front door came, Hanzo yelped and nearly sliced the end of his finger off  _ again. _

“... were you expecting any visitors?” Amélie asked cautiously and stopped mid-flip for a piece of bacon.

“No...” Hanzo frowned, gripping the knife tightly for a moment before placing it back on the cutting board after a moment. He glanced back at the angel still snoring away peacefully on the futon as if his very existence weren’t possibly jeopardized by whomever was at the door. Who in their right mind came to call at seven in the morning?

Hanzo slowly advanced on the door and pulled back the metal slide that kept his peephole from being visible as it was little more than a hole in the door and others could ostensibly look in if they desired. He wasn’t fond of that prospect so he kept it shut.

“Come on, Hanzo. I know you’re in there… open up.”

Sergeant Gabriel  _ fucking _ Reyes.

_ “Chikushou!” _ Hanzo hissed, shutting the slide back in a hurry and spun around on his socks so quickly that he nearly fell on his ass in the middle of the slick linoleum floor.

“Who is it?” Amélie asked, eyes wide as she watched Hanzo search the apartment for another blanket and tossed it over the angel with little regard for his face or ease of breathing.

“It’s my parole officer.” Hanzo spat, turning with grabbing motions before taking the throw pillows from the nearby chairs and tossing them over onto the futon. The entire point seemed to be disguising the angel as much as possible.

_ “Parole officer?!” _ Amélie shrieked, looking at the door and then back at Hanzo. “How? You got a FASFA-- How-- You… You...  _ Merde!  _ You never said you went to _ prison!” _

“I  _ didn’t _ but try telling him that!” Hanzo snarled, looking over his shoulder as he knew full well that Gabriel was listening through the door. Probably smirking to himself too, smarmy shit. “If you asked him, I’m a fucking murderer who has to be watched!”

She ran a shaky hand through her loose bangs. Amélie had plenty of reason to be concerned about random cops with grudges showing up. Her family were a bunch of powerful arms-dealers with a lot of old money in France and while she had no affiliation to the family business that didn’t mean that an opportunistic local cop couldn't get it into his head to make an example out of her. She was here legally on a student visa and she very nearly had her citizenship but the problem with the current climate was that legality didn’t matter; Amélie had an accent and that meant trouble.

Legally speaking, they could hold her an entire 24 hours if they wanted to without ever charging her with anything. That was the life of an immigrant in America in 2020.  

“So.. So do you think he’s working with ICE?” Amélie whispered in the lowest tone she could manage, coming over to try and help Hanzo cover the angel whilst wondering why they didn’t just turn the policeman away.

“I don’t think so. He’s hispanic. I don’t believe he cares one way or the other.” That much, at least, was comforting. Sgt. Gabriel Reyes was an equal opportunity douchebag; he hated everyone exactly the same. “I doubt he’ll care about you at all… unless he gets it in his head that you’re some kind of accessory.  _ Then _ he’ll stick to you like the unofficial crime you never committed.”

_ “Hanzo? Why don’t you open up so we can talk? I know you’re in there. I heard your friend.” _

He grit his teeth tightly and turned to the door once again. He just wished this asshole would  _ go away. _ Just when he thought he was free of the police, there Reyes was showing right back up at his door with another bunch of stupid questions that he didn’t have answers to.

“Please go away!” Hanzo called, “I don’t consent to an interview and I’m invoking the fifth amendment. Please leave the property!”

The detective had a way with his emotions, Hanzo could swear his rolled eyes could be  _ heard _ through the door as he leaned on it from the outside and caused the old frame to creak slightly.  _ “Now now, Hanzo. Don’t be that way…”  _ He said with a charm that had long since worn off on the Japanese man inside. It now only served to piss Hanzo off.  _ “I could get a warrant..” _

“On what grounds!?” Hanzo snarled as Amélie began to walk for the door. “No judge would sign a warrant so you could harass me. That’s what this is! It’s harassment! I’m going to sue your ass back into hell where you belong!”

_ “You and what lawyer?” _ Reyes reminded with an audible grin in his tone. Hanzo had already tried to press charges against him and every lawyer he presented it to took one look at Gabe’s sparkling record and then at Hanzo’s questionable history as an amnesiac and refused to even take the case.

Hanzo grit his teeth tightly, biting his tongue between them until he tasted the warm bloom of iron and the dull pain became sharp and hot. Amélie continued to advance on the door but when she put her hand out to open it, Hanzo stopped her with a sharp rebuke. “Don’t open that!” He very nearly spat the words at her with all the hatred he saved just for the thorn in his side currently leaning on the other side.

He pulled himself back and the muscles in his jaw twitched at how tightly he was gritting his teeth in effort not to lash out again. It wasn’t Amélie’s fault and he knew that. “If you open the door, it can be termed nonverbal consent.” He explained tightly, grinding it through clenched teeth and the still bleeding tongue.

“...you sound like you learned that the hard way.”

“I  _ did.” _ Hanzo hissed and walked to the door to lock the deadbolt just as the handle jiggled some. “It’s also not wise to leave it unlocked. They’re essentially criminals with a bigger playbook; you can’t give them an opening.”

_ “Now, now, Hanzo, I take offense to that.” _ Gabriel called through the door and then something shimmied under through the crack in the door. Hanzo expected a business card--just like the countless others he’d burned over the years--but instead it was a grainy and dark photo. It had been clearly shot on a phone and then printed at a nearby drugstore. One glance at the back told which one... speaking of which, after that kind of a storm exactly  _ which _ Walgreens was open? Because he was clearly getting his prescriptions filled at the wrong place.

“What is this?” He asked, looking at it but still not opening the door just yet. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at by the shitty quality and nonexistent lighting.

_ “We had reports of somebody trolling around here late last night. Digging through the garbage and whatnot.” _ Gabe’s tone had turned somewhat serious which was a departure from his usual spiel.  _ “Believe it or not, Handsoap, I was concerned about you.” _

“I’m firmly in the ‘not’ camp.” Hanzo spluttered out incredulously. He couldn’t trust this particular police Sergeant as far as he could toss him and the guy was  _ huge. _

_ “Don’t be like that. Some guy is creeping around your apartment in the dark and I’ve got a personal investment in your safety. I’ve got a good reason to be concerned.” _ His voice lowered and the wood creaked as he leaned up against it heavier than before, _ “I just wanna make sure you’re not up to your old tricks.” _

“Oh so that’s what this is then?!” Hanzo knew the rouse by this point; he’d fallen for it a couple of times. The point was to piss him off so much that he opened the door and revoked that right. “You think... what? You think it’s me out just… running around in the dark? Are you fucking crazy?! It’s the middle of the worst storm system we’ve seen in decades! Why would I be out doing anything? I was asleep!”

_ “I’m pretty sure I’m not the crazy one here, Hanzo.”  _ That one nearly had him ripping the door open just to stick his finger in that smug face and give him the what for.  _ “Regardless, I’ve knocked on a couple of doors already and they all confirm a guy about your height and build. Asian. Running around here last night. Have you dyed your hair green recently?” _

“No!” Hanzo squawked, voice nearly cracking at the audacity that he might actually dye his hair some strange and unnatural color like that. “I was in here.

Amélie was here too, she can tell you.”

_ “Oh I’m sure your friend will back up anything you say, Hanzo. Got no doubt of that much. They’re always real loyal to you.” _

“And what the hell does that mean?” He was getting utterly sick of Gabriel and his bullshit. “Do you have a warrant? I’m renting this entire floor, it’s in my lease--” Which was something Hanzo had put in after one of the last run-ins with the nosy policeman. “--So get off my property, Reyes.”

_ “You don’t own anything,” _ Hanzo was really sick of his voice. Gabriel Reyes haunted his days and nights making every moment he wasn’t being vigilant into a walking nightmare. It was bad enough he remembered the interrogations as much as he did, why did this nuisance keep coming back.  _ “But I’ll let you be for now. Just keep that picture, ok Handsoap? I got a feeling you’ll need it later.” _

“You’re illegally trespassing on my property, Reyes. Get out.” Hanzo snarled and waited until he heard the policeman begin to thump his way down the old staircase to collapse against the door. That was a close call. The problem with tangling with the police was that sometimes they got creative. He’d learned that they could hold you on suspicion for something even if they had no proof. If you looked at them funny, they’d try to book you. It was just a good thing that Zen didn’t seem to care about Gabe and his shenanigans or else Hanzo would be out of a job.

“Is that… normal,  _ mon chou?” _ There were few things in this world that Hanzo hated as much as hearing Amélie strike that tone of concern. He hated to worry her, she didn’t deserve that.

“...unfortunately. I had thought he’d forgotten about me. I was mistaken.” He frowned, the motion leaving deep creases between his eyebrows and in his cheeks where he had spent so long frowning over the last few years that his face remembered the expression with great intimacy. “I only wish he would leave me alone.” Anyone who had ever made it onto the books in inner city Philly could attest that once the police had someone on the radar, they rarely ever let them go. Investigators had this thing called a ‘gut feeling’ about people and even though it could be  _ completely wrong,  _ they would pursue that like a dog with a goddamn bone.

When she knelt in front of him to check on Hanzo, he buried his face into his knees and waved a hand. “Please don’t touch me, Amélie. I’ve--” He sucked in a shuddering breath through his mouth and dug his fingers into his hair, “I’m not really ready for that.”

“I apologize.” Amélie shouldn’t have to apologize to him for this. It wasn’t her fault and that struck like a stone falling into the base of his stomach and getting lodged there. She should never have to feel sorry for this.

“Don’t apologize. This isn’t your fault.” He mumbled, sitting there for long minutes as the sudden turmoil slowly calmed down. They both noticed it at the same time; the bacon was burning.

_ “Merde! _ I’m sorry--” Amélie apologized again but didn’t make it to the stove before he did. He shook his head, waving one hand through the air as if to dismiss her apology as little more than air.

“It’s only bacon. I can make more. It’s fine, Amélie, really.” Hanzo looked down at the skillet and sighed as he finally turned the pink and white side over to reveal the entirely too cooked underneath. A perfectly good morning ruined by an investigator on a witch hunt. The man pulled the skillet off and began to scoop the burned bacon into the trash. “Let’s talk about something more pleasant… How is Gérard?”

Amélie chewed her lower lip, looking away and Hanzo wished he hadn’t brought it up. Clearly he wasn’t doing any better.

“He is still on the vent…” She pursed her lips, crossing her arms while attempting to decide how to put it. “They attempted to take him off the medicine? The white milky kind that keeps him asleep--”

“Diprivan,” Hanzo provided gently, reaching out to put a hand on her shoulder for a few moments. 

“--Yes, that. It went well for a small while. They expected him to keep waking up because they brought him off the hypothermia and his brain looked alright but… He didn’t wake up. They’re not sure why. They’ve left the medicine off.” She sat down heavily in one of the kitchen chairs and looked at the ceiling. Gérard was her best friend and he had been in an psuedo Neuro-ICU since his catastrophic car crash. They’d expected him to be DOA and yet, he hung onto life. 

Sort of.

Hanzo opened another package of bacon and began to cook it, shuffling the pieces as a heavy silence fell over them. “Did they say… if they had any idea when he might wake up? Or more treatment?”

“I do not know. I couldn’t stay in the room.” Amélie shook her head and stared at her feet. “I couldn’t force myself to listen to them any longer.”

Gérard had been her best friend. Hanzo had always expected them to get together, and perhaps in another life they might have, but in this life Amélie’s school had always come first until it was too late. He didn’t know if it was because she was exclusively into women, since he knew she was, or if it was because they’d simply missed each other in the coming and going… but it was a tragedy. His heart ached for her. He and Gérard had never been close but it was tragic nevertheless.

“I’m so sorry.” He whispered, head bowed. He didn’t know what else to say in the face of such a tremendous mis-step.

“Do not--” Amélie held up a hand and silenced him before he could dissolve into self-deprecating apologies. “You can only know what I tell you. I should tell you more.”

“I shouldn’t pry.”

“You shouldn’t have to.”

The pair of them were quiet for a long time and eventually Amélie went back to the loveseat and picked up her phone so she could begin reading a book on it. The silence between them stretched long enough for Hanzo to finish making the food and set it beside her on the chair. She thanked him softly and watched Han settle at the kitchen table to tap out a few thousand more words.

“Have you gotten any comments?” She asked softly. The first time he’d admitted to it, Amélie had thought his hobby was weird but after a while she’d realized it brought him joy where very few things could. That alone was worth supporting his endeavor.

“Nah. Bunch of kudos but no comments.” He frowned, lips pulled to the side. “Don’t give me that ‘write for myself’ speech again. I do, it’s just nice to hear from the people reading it.” Hanzo rest his chin on one hand, idly scrolling through his old comments to re-read the kind words left in the months and years before.

Amélie opened her mouth to reply to that before huffing softly and giving him a smile. “I can understand that… but if it’s anything like the work you did for our creative writing back in undergrad, I’m sure it’s good.”

“It’s better than that,” He sniffed, seeming a bit insulted that she might think he hadn’t gotten any better in over four years. “I’ve had more practice.”

“I’m sure you have.” Amélie chuckled, pulling the blanket back over her legs and began to nibble on a bit of bacon while she read. If Hanzo ever found out that she was reading through his collection, she’d never hear the end of it.

This silence was less stifling and occasionally broken by a muffled giggle or a particularly enlightened run of speedy typing or sometimes, even more rare than either of the other two, there was a run of snores from the Angel on the couch. The first one had startled them both so much that Hanzo had to jump up from his chair and pull the pillows off their sleeping guest. He wouldn’t want to accidentally smother him; then all that work of pulling him up the stairs would be for naught.

Hanzo was just settling back into his chair when they both heard a noise from outside the window that lead to the fire escape. He turned around in his rolling office chair and sat there, making eye contact with her a few times before Amélie finally got up and wandered toward the window with her bare feet padding over the hardwood. “You don’t think he’s still out there, do you?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he was.” Gabriel Reyes was a tenacious man. If he could hold onto a hunch for ten years, he could sit outside the apartment for 2 hours. He’d done creepier shit before.

Amélie slowly moved in front of the window and pulled back the long quilt, looking out the window timidly as if just doing so were tempting a nearby sniper to take her head off. “I don’t… see him?”

“You’re sure?”

“I am. I don’t see anyone. All the cars are covered in snow. There’s no one--” Amélie cut herself off. Hanzo turned back around in his chair and raised an eyebrow in curiosity. She was looking down at the floor and had one foot hovering up. “Han, there’s something sticky on your floor. This is nasty; did Max spill something and not tell you again?  _ Merde, _ that boy.”

“He hasn’t been over here in weeks so if he did it’s been there for a while.” He sighed, getting up and heading to the kitchen to get a kitchen towel and wet it down.

“It’s  _ black.” _ Which meant whatever it was probably had been there for weeks.

“Ugh.” Hanzo groaned, walking back to her and knelt down to first wipe whatever it was off the bottom of her foot and then wash the floor. Hanzo glanced at the cloth as he scrubbed it up, noticing it was coming up black too… a bit like ink. Whatever it was probably had never been food. Weird. “Hey, Amélie? What do you figure this dust is?” Hanzo questioned, noticing that there were small piles of white dust on either side of the window and he rubbed some between his fingers.

“It looks like sheetrock dust.” She commented, “It’s probably coming from the window. The wind was shaking it last night,  _ mon chou.” _

“Ah, you’re probably right.” Hanzo nodded and cleaned it up easily. He couldn’t quite get the black that had seeped between the hardwood slats but it would have to be good enough for now.

“Can I get some of yer bacon? Smells ‘mazing.” A groggy voice called in an accent from the deep south. Hanzo looked up and realized the angel must have woken when they pulled the pillows off of him.

“You’re awake! Are you alright?” Hanzo asked, getting up. Amélie handed him her plate, since she’d barely plucked at it after the mention of Gérard, and he gave it to the angel along with a fork.

“I feel like I got kicked by a mule.” He groaned, rubbing his head but began to devour the food as if he hadn’t eaten in days; Hanzo figured he might not have.

“What’s your name? I’m Hanzo.” He reluctantly slipped into the back room so that he could grab some medicine for the angel. He seemed rather flushed.

“Jesse. Jesse McCree. Nice ta meetcha.” He mumbled, taking the medicine along with the water Amélie provided from the refrigerator.

“I am Amélie.” The ballerina was quickly grabbing her things from around the apartment. “Hanzo, I just realized I have a paper due soon. I’ve got to go.”

“What--?” Hanzo tried not to whine, “But… Amélie…!” 

Jesse glanced between the pair of them and then raised his eyebrows before tucking into the food again. It wasn’t his place to say anything here; the food was good and it wasn’t his business. 

“I’m.. I’m sorry about her. She’s weird about being here when I have other people over.” He smiled some, rubbing his hands together. “She didn’t used to be like that but…” Everything had changed after Gérard’s wreck. Amélie would never be the same. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“It’s fine, don’t worry.” The Angel, Jesse, smiled and then looked around. “Where am I? Last I knew I was gettin’ jumped then I woke up here.”

“This is my apartment. I, uh, I found you and scared them off. I didn’t know what to do so I brought you here and got you patched up.” Hanzo flushed and worried his hands together so much so that he threatened to rub the skin over one of the knuckles on his thumb off. “I hope you don’t mind. I didn’t know what else to do--”

“Nah, it’s better than the alternative. Thank you… Ya probably saved my life.” When the man grinned, Hanzo felt as if the room had warmed several degrees.

Sometimes the only appropriate response is silence.


	4. The most painful goodbyes are the ones that are left unsaid and never explained.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Sadly enough, the most painful goodbyes are the ones that are left unsaid and never explained.”  
> ― Jonathan Harnisch, Freak

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew! It's been a long time! I hope everyone has had a good month or so! Enjoy the chapter <3

Amélie wasn’t returning any of his messages.

Not that she’d ever been particularly good at keeping in touch before but with the storms that kept ripping up the East Coast and burying Philadelphia in layer after layer of snow, Hanzo was beginning to get concerned. It’d been 3 days since she had just suddenly left with the introduction of the Angel into their lives and without her, he was starting to feel lonely.

Hanzo glanced down at his phone again, chewing on his lower lip as it blinked a low battery at him again. The power had been out for the last 24 hours and it was starting to show up in all the battery powered devices. He’d already drained his laptop battery to charge his phone up. A brief glance through his call history would be enough to show that he’d called the power company no less than 4 times in the last few days while trying to ascertain exactly when the lights would come back up.

The only upside to this entire thing was the fact that they had enough propane to at least keep the front room warm for himself and Jesse. He only wished he could figure this angel out. Hanzo shifted in the loveseat that had become his bed over the past few nights and glanced over at the couch. Without power, there was no internet. The angel shifted some as he looked anxiously at the balcony again. The past few days had been no shortage of discovery; apparently angels could put their wings away. They could also be pack-a-day smokers who were jonesing for some nicotine.

The more you knew.

Hanzo shivered and pulled his blankets closer around himself while he looked out. The first time the wings had vanished, he’d actually been startled. He asked Jesse about them, to which the Angel gave him the most innocently confused expression ever and replied with ‘What wings?’ Apparently the first rule of angel club was that you didn’t talk about angel club. Han sighed and looked back at his notebook. Without power and no feasible way of making it to work, especially with Zenyatta calling him and making sure he knew that he was not to even try with the weather, Hanzo had resorted to doodling.

It wasn’t that the man was particularly gifted, the exact opposite actually the whole thing looked positively grotesque, but it was a good way to pass the time. He sighed and ripped another sheet out of the notebook he’d bought in a bulk pack when he’d started college all those years ago and tossed it at the wall. Laptops all but made notebooks obsolete and he’d realized that by sophomore year. Still, in times like these it was good to have one or two around.

“Ya gonna burn them scribbles, darlin’?” Jesse drawled from where he was laying on his back and staring out the window. The snow had stopped early that morning and the army of plows outside gave Hanzo hope of a return to the status quo. The angel turned his head and grinned slowly at Hanzo in a way that made him flush over the top of his high cheekbones and look away. “Might help t’ warm the joint up.”

Damn him for being so charming. Hanzo felt the flush starting to reach down his neck and into the collar of his shirt and he shrugged some, getting up and wrapping the blankets around himself. “I don’t think propane burners are designed for that.” He retorted, though he felt silly for not having a snappier reply. Amélie would be catty and be able to throw something equally charming back but Hanzo? Hanzo could only fluster and grumble about how predictable the southern man’s tastes were.

These past few days had given him precious little information about the angel. He knew that he was from the south, though not from Texas. Asking him if he was from Texas only seemed to gain a derisive snort and a shake of the head. Could angels really be from anywhere in particular?

It only furthered his theory that they were actually a separate species and not some kind of divine messenger as they’d always been made out to be.

Jesse’s stomach growling ripped him out of his revere. They’d been stuck in here with the marginal groceries that Hanzo had in the house and it was starting to dwindle down. Before the internet had gone down, Jesse had at least managed to connect to his banking establishments--which apparently angels had banks and credit--and tell them not to let his information out, but that meant that all his assets were essentially tied up.

“‘m real sorry ‘bout that.” Jesse’s voice called as he sat up and ran a hand through his shaggy brown hair to assemble it into some kind of order. “I hate bein’ such an imposition on ya, sugar.”

That was another thing about the angel, he was sweet in ways that made Hanzo’s stomach twist. Whenever the weather calmed down, the man would no doubt be on a plane back to Sante Fe; Hanzo shouldn’t be getting so attached to him.

“It isn’t a problem.” What kind of host would he be for getting upset with an angel for getting hungry? Besides, the man had been the one cooking for them over the last few days. Hanzo could burn water and after the first fiasco, Jesse had taken over cooking.

“I’m eatin’ ya out of house ‘n home, Sug’.” Jesse worried, following the asian man as he wrapped himself up in a blanket and began to head into the kitchen to look for food. Hanzo never kept much in his kitchen, his paycheck to paycheck lifestyle just wouldn’t accommodate that, but he had hoped it would be enough to make it to the end of the winter disaster outside.

Opening the fridge came with the risk of letting out the cold that would keep the food inside good while the power was out, except for the fact that the only thing in his fridge was a jar of pickles that only had one left and a bottle of mayo. Hanzo could have _sworn_ he’d bought groceries only a few days ago, Amélie had even helped him put them away, but there was nothing in there save for dead air and broken dreams.

...and growling cowboy tummies.

Jesse could make something out of mostly nothing but absolutely nothing was more than his stone soup skills could make up for. The man’s stomach rumbled and Hanzo’s matched it with an equally ferocious growl and he knew it was finally time to call in reinforcements. Hopefully. Considering his phone was now blinking with 10% battery, it might be a better idea to text in reinforcements.

“I only know one person who is willing to get out in this kind of weather,” Hanzo mumbled, trying to power on his cellphone and squinting at the dark screen. It was down to 5%. “I’m not sure my phone will let me call him any--”

As if on cue, the lights flickered back on and the stove blinked 12:00 at them in bright red.

“That’s mighty convenient.” Jesse drawled, watching in amusement as Hanzo rushed over to start plugging in all his devices to charge them as much as possible before the power went out. With the promise of more storms on the horizon it was only a matter of time until it went out again.

“I’m not about to question it.” Hanzo quipped as he watched his phone glow and begin to charge up so he could text out a call for help. As much as he wanted to leave it there for longer, 30% would have to do and he shoved it into his back pocket. “Do you want anything?”

“Ask them if they could pick up a pack of reds for me.” Jesse spoke as he idly flicked on the radio and tuned it until he heard a local news broadcast. Hanzo’s TV was connected to his game stations so if Jesse wanted current events, he’d have to get it from a radio.

_[Hanzo 12/13/2020 1204]_

_Hey, can you do me a favor?_

_[GHOST 12/13/2020 1205]_

_Depends on what you want lol_

_[Hanzo 12/13/2020 1207]_

_Well. I got a visitor and I’m out of food and we’re kind of stuck in here…_

_[GHOST 12/13/2020 1210]_

_Yeah, I heard you picked up a stray_

For a moment, Hanzo was worried Max might not actually agree to it. It was cold as hell out there and it was a long way to walk… did Max have a car? Could he even drive? He’d never actually thought to ask; Max was just this side of legally blind so probably not.

_[GHOST 12/13/2020 1211]_

_Fine, what you want?_

A wall of relief hit him and he smiled, typing away a reply to Max. There was a reason that out of all the people he worked with, Max was the one he called in times like this--at least when he couldn’t get ahold of Amélie. The boy was reliable and solid as a rock. Considering he was shorter than Hanzo and half as broad, he wasn’t entirely sure how the Newark native managed to traverse the snow as if he belonged there but it never seemed to bug him.

_[Hanzo 12/13/2020 1213]_

_You’re the best, Max. Any leftovers you’re alright with us taking and he’s requesting a ‘pack of reds’? I don’t know what those are other than cigarettes._

_[GHOST 12/13/2020 1214]_

_Sounds like a hick. He want shorts or normal?_

Hanzo blinked a couple of times at his phone, looking up at Jesse who was grimacing at a case playing over the radio.

“...advantage of the storm to mug passerbys got more than they bargained for..” Jesse shook his head and chewed on his lower lip.

“Hey, he’s asking if you want shorts or normal? Whatever that means.” Hanzo asked, idly listening to the radio too.

“Uh, longs if they’ve got them. I like t’ savor ‘em.” Jesse replied, watching the radio in the same way one might expect someone transfixed by a television to stare at horrible news.

_[Hanzo 12/13/2020 1219]_

_Longs, if they have them._

“...nearly eviscerated--” Jesse flicked the radio off and pulled the blankets closer to himself while muttering about how ‘these yanks’ were some other breed of bat-shit crazy. He instead began to explore the warm room with the quilt pulled up over his head. It wasn’t warm in there, by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn’t _that_ cold. Hanzo checked the external temp on Soba’s tank and snorted at Jesse’s triple layers of socks. Fifty-nine degrees fahrenheit wasn’t _that_ cold. Compared to outside it was positively balmy.

“Are you alright?” Hanzo asked, watching Jesse flick on the electric keyboard in the corner and test a few keys. He didn’t seem to have any idea what he was doing, save for a rendition of Chopsticks done with one hand to avoid losing the blanket, but it was entertaining if nothing else.

“‘m freezin’ my balls off, sugar. We been over this, I ain’t from here. ‘m _cold.”_ He laughed, but it was forced and the angel pulled his covers closer again while Hanzo opted to instead go turn the electric heating on.

“Fifty-nine isn’t that bad.” Hanzo commented lightly, bending down to the ancient heating strips around the bases of his walls to check that they were actually beginning to power up. “Just put on another sweater.”

“Han-zo, I am wearing _four_ sweaters already.” Jesse complained lightly, walking to sit beside the heater almost petulantly and pull the blankets closer. “I wish I had my hat.”

The hat that Hanzo had left laying after saving him had been a point of contention between them. Jesse was upset that it wasn’t saved and Hanzo insisted that it didn’t matter because it was just a hat.

“This again?” Hanzo sighed, rolling his eyes and walked into the kitchen to try and avoid the conversation entirely. “I saved your life and you’re upset about a hat.”

“That hat was sentimental. I ain’t upset about ya savin’ me, I’m mighty grateful. I just wish ya could’a saved ma hat too.” Jesse at least had the good sense to look ashamed of himself. It was hard to be upset with those big amber eyes staring into his soul.

“I’m sorry about the hat. I am truly sorry about your hat, Jesse,” Hanzo began to fill the kettle from its spot on the counter as he felt the phone buzz in his back pocket. “But you can always get a new one.”

“Yeah, I know.” Informing Jesse that he was an amnesiac hadn’t been as difficult as Hanzo had originally imagined. The first night of sleeping in the same room, he had woken with his usual nightmare only to find that the angel was standing over him worried and trying to wake him up. Jesse was the last person Hanzo would expect to take a dream like that in stride, being an angel and all, but he had and Han was grateful.

Since the dreams happened every night, had happened for 10 years straight, it wasn’t likely that they’d stop, the acceptance from his impromptu roommate was appreciated. Hanzo reached into his back pocket as he sat the kettle on the stove and flicked on the switch.

_[GHOST 12/13/2020 1231]_

_Marlboro or Pall Mall?_

“Do you want Mall-- Marr-- Marlbo...lo? or Pall Mall?” Hanzo asked, trying not to let his accent butcher the first word too much. R and L were notoriously difficult for him, which was an artifact from Japanese that he didn’t even remember the reason for. 

“It’s Marlboro, darlin’,” Jesse chuckled, leaning on the counter as he smiled fondly. Between mispronouncing the cigarette name and the way Jesse had begun to look at him, Hanzo was flushing a dark red and hiding his face behind a hand perched on the opposite arm as he held himself with it. “And I like them or Luckies.”

“Right. I’ll tell him.” Hanzo mumbled.

_[Hanzo 12/13/2020 1235]_

_Marlboro._

_[GHOST 12/13/2020 1236]_

_How long did it take you to say it?_

_[Hanzo 12/13/2020 1237]_  
  
_Fuck off. It 'hisn't' any of your business._  
  
Hanzo could hear the Italian-American laughing even if he was miles away. Max had a way of finding just the right thing to rib someone about and get under their skin in a hurry. He had no doubt that he'd have a good time with the new cowboy. Hanzo had to force himself to remember that Jesse wasn't going to be staying for long. Even if he did have business here, the moment the storm was over the bounty hunter would be back on his way to finding escaped cons and trying to follow leads that the police had long since let run dry.    
  
_[GHOST 12/13/2020 1240]_  
  
_I guess I deserved that lol_  
  
It begged the question: Why would an angel have any kind of occupation? Hanzo's eyes settled on his kettle, looking through it as though waiting for it to boil as his mind wandered onto the topic at hand. Why would an angel have a job? Why a bounty hunter? In the last few days it had been as if any mention of being an angel was a taboo because of the strange way Jesse would look at him whenever he brought it up. Did Jesse honestly expect him to just forget seeing those huge wings? Was he seriously expecting Hanzo to just forget?  
  
Then again, Hanzo had forgotten a huge swath of his former self so what was losing a few more days in the middle? It wasn't as if he wouldn't notice things moving that shouldn't have been. The psychiatrists that worked with him had always said that the biggest evidence of losing time would be the fact that things were places he didn't leave them last. Everything was always exactly where it belonged.  
  
He was jolted out of his reverie by the whistling of the kettle as it boiled. This whole thing was just the kind of rabbit hole that he'd fought with for the first few years of being on his own after the entire ordeal. If Hanzo let himself think about it for too long, he'd end up losing his mind over the 'what if's and the 'maybe's. The best way to handle those thoughts was not to let them seed themselves into his mind at all.    
  
Hanzo took a tea ball and scooped it into one of his loose leaf green tea containers before dropping it into a cup and pouring the hot water over the top. "Do you want any tea?"  
  
"Sugar, I don't think y'all know how t' make tea up here. I think I'll pass." Jesse chuckled, though it ended in a cough that had him holding his side and wincing.  
  
"Are you sure that you don't want to go to the doctor? You must be in pain." Hanzo couldn't help but be concerned about his house guest. He'd put a lot of effort into making sure that the man was well taken care of.  
  
"Nah. Can't afford t' go see a doctor. Only thing gonna be open right now is the hospital and emergency bills are ridic'lous." Hanzo hated how right he was. What had possessed his former self to want to move to this country of all places? Japan had a wonderful healthcare system. It made no sense.  
  
"That doesn't seem right." Hanzo mused, cupping the mug between his chilly hands with a sigh and checked the time on his phone. It was nearly 1 in the afternoon now and, as much as he hated to admit it, he was hoping that Max would show up sooner rather than later. Hanzo was getting hungry and Max was a pretty good cook—especially when you were hungry.    
  
"No, it really don’t but that's the state of America now. We're makin' it great again, as if it weren't great before." Jesse's deeply sarcastic tone had Hanzo grinning into his tea despite himself. When he'd first met the cowboy, his instinct had been to expect guns, trucks, and misogyny but while Jesse seemed to be quite proficient with firearms—they'd had a lot of free time to talk and very little in common to talk about—and liked a truck or two, misogyny hadn't been a thing that the cowboy expressed. It was refreshing. If only Amélie would have stuck around to truly get to know him, maybe they could have been friends too.    
  
As much as politics sounded like a good idea, because right now it seemed like they would agree on a lot of things, he wanted to get away from the subject on the off chance that they didn't agree on something. "So... You mentioned that you were a bounty hunter... are you going back home after the storm lets up?"  
  
Jesse shook his head, slowly lowering himself down on the futon again so that he could rest without jarring that injury again. "Nah, there's a huge contract up here and I'm trying to collect. I'd give you more details but that's all I know at the moment. The contract is worth millions if I can cash it in."  
  
"Sounds exciting," He was honestly curious about exactly who, or what, Jesse was hunting up here but the angel had already said he didn't have any more answers than that. "When do you think you can find out more?"  
  
"I was supposed to meet my informant when I got jumped," Jesse frowned, puffing air up to move his bangs from his forehead. "I'll have to get onto my email and try to see if they'd be willing to talk to me again. I'm not sure I can do it if the representative from the person offering the cash won't even talk to me. They're supposed to be giving me the details. Hell, I look like shit. They might not even let me take the gig."  
  
"Fair enough." Hanzo sipped his tea in silence, occasionally glancing over the half wall into the living room so he could sneak a few looks at Jesse. "If you're going to be in town for a while... would you be interested in staying here? I've had an ad out for a roommate for months. In the last few days you've proven yourself clean and able to cook which is better than the last six applicants.”

“That's real sweet there, Hanzo,” ‘but’, there was always a ‘but’ and Hanzo just sighed into his tea. He didn't know why he expected anything different out of Jesse than he had gotten out of anyone else; no one wanted to share a run down apartment with an amnesiac who routinely wakes up with vivid and violent nightmares. “But I'll have t’ getta rain check till I at least know iffin I'm gonna get the gig. No point in gettin’ yer hopes up if I'm just gonna end up goin’ home in a couple days.”

That let down could have been significantly more brutal and it did leave the option open, at least, so Hanzo supposed he would have to be happy with it for now. Better than a flat out ‘no’. Worse too. Hanzo would almost rather have a ‘no’ than be strung along but he had to hope that the whole thing was genuine. “That's fair.” Hanzo murmured into his tea, watching the swirls of foam rise from the top as his sweetener slowly dissolved. It might be better for his dissertation if he didn't have a beautiful angel in the apartment with him while he tried to work.

Hanzo pulled out his phone and flipped open the messages tab as if by instinct, tapping on Amélie’s name. Still nothing back from her, she hasn't returned any of his text messages. He worried about her, she hasn't really been herself since the crash with Gérard. It was almost like he didn't know her anymore. It was to be expected, what with how close she and Gee had always been, that she would be out of sorts.

Was half an hour too soon to start asking when he'd be here? Max wasn't exactly a pizza delivery service. Hanzo decided to risk the Italian's ire and text him again.

_[Hanzo 12/13/2020 1322]_

_Hey, how is it going?_

_[GHOST 12/13/2020 1325]_

_Hanzo I swear to fucking christ if you message me again I'm gonna give these cigs to the nearest homeless guy and go home_

He smiled despite himself, grinning at the phone as he returned an ok hand emoji back to the fuming tech guy. Max was one of those people that would bitch and moan like helping you was the biggest imposition of his life, while getting up and doing what you asked as quickly as possible, because he liked being needed. Zenyatta had described him as a cranky old man stuck in the body of a Gen Z kid. The only upside to this message was that it meant Max had already left his house with the leftovers _and_ had made it far enough to pick up cigarettes. So far, so good.

“So, since the power is back on,” Jesse drawled from the front room where he was scrolling idly through the local weather on Hanzo’s laptop with a guest account, “Think y'all will be able t’ go back t’ work? I gotta get an appointment fer a doctor and get back t’ doin’ what I do best.”

“What's the forecast say?” Hanzo asked idly, typing away at one of the new documents he had started on his phone. Sherlock was an angel this time and it was all about how angels weren't divine bringers of good tidings at all. In fact, they were opioid addled consulting detectives that didn't understand humans and didn't care to. It was one of his greatest works; three comments within the first eight hours.

“Cold, cold, with a side of _really fuckin’_ cold.” Jesse frowned, trying to shift around on the futon to be comfortable but his injuries made that impossible. “I hate this place, it's some kinda white hell.”

Hanzo chuckled to himself and shook his head, moving instead to check the stats on his NaNoWriMo that he had posted another chapter for the night before out of boredom. Having an angel around seemed like it would be entertaining, but it was decidedly _not._ Jesse mostly slept off the effects of the pain medicine and tried not to shift around too much. “It'll grow on you.”

“Like mold.” Jesse grumbled, sticking out his lower lip into a pout.

“How old are you?” Hanzo suddenly blurted out, flushing red as he realized how invasive that question was. Lucky for him, Jesse seemed to take it in stride.

“Twenty-three.” The cowboy grinned, taking in the way Hanzo scoffed and did his best impression of Soba’s gaping fish mouth. Jesse was fully aware that he didn't look twenty-three in the slightest, because of his beard, but if he shaved it off, he would look all of fourteen. Needless to say, he left it as it was.

_Merde._

Hanzo felt like an old man. He fell back against the wall that would hide him from the angel and rub his fingers over the temples where he’d found his first gray hair a few weeks ago. Was he old? How do you know? Was Jesse just young? How did he know? Was he a cougar? Could men be a cougar? Was that just a female thing? _Shit._ Did this make him a creep? Yes, this absolutely made him a creep. Hanzo was a fucking creep, this guy was super young and he was super not. Could men be cougars?

“Hey, you ok in there, sugar?” Jesse’s voice filtered in from the other room and Hanzo looked around the wall to smile over the half-wall dividing the kitchen from the living space. He must have made more noise when he landed against the wall than he’d originally realized.  

“Yes! I’m--” _Having a midlife crisis over here, don’t mind me._ “I’m fine!”

Jesse just raised an eyebrow at him before giving a shrug and _instantly_ regretting it as the motion aggravated his injuries further. “Y’ don’t look fine. Y’ look like me bein’ 23 is some kinda tragedy.”

 _It_ was   _a tragedy._ “No, no, I slipped on some water. I think I dropped an ice cube earlier. It’s nothing! I didn’t want to worry you.”

“Sheeeee-it, is it even warm enough to melt ice in here?” Jesse complained again, earning him a scathing glower from his host as Hanzo huffed out  a sigh.

“It is indeed warm enough to melt ice,” It melted his innate frigid bitch for a few hours, at least. “It’s not as cold as you think it is in here.”

“You say that but I ain’t from here, Han’. I ain’t accustomed to y’alls weather. Hell has fuckin’ froze over and I’m there.”

Would angels actually know what Hell looked like? Did Hell even exist? These were suddenly questions that he needed answered. If Hell existed, did that mean Heaven existed? Did that mean that Buddhism was wrong? Where did that leave Taoism? It could be right still, maybe. _Maybe._

Hanzo stood in the kitchen staring into his barren spice cabinet in a tailspin halfway between a midlife crisis and an existential crisis when someone finally knocked on the door. The shock of coming out of that train of thought was enough to nearly get him to yelp. _Nearly._ Han wasn’t about to admit to actually yelping but the laughing angel made him consider that it might have actually happened. ‘Nearly’ was his story and he was sticking to it.

“Beep beep, motherfucker! You gonna let me in or am I chuckin’ yer shit in the snow--” Max’s voice filtered through the door and Hanzo rolled his eyes. Some things never changed. Max’s impulsive and brash personality may be why he worked in IT. He seemed to like instant gratification. Maybe he liked answers now?

Or maybe it was just cold as _balls_ outside.

A blast of arctic air hit Hanzo in the face as he opened the door to let Max in, nearly getting knocked down by the force of the small Italian rushing to get in and get warm again. “Yo, Hanzo. It isn’t bad enough that ya got me out doin’ runnin’ for youse, ya gotta lock me out too? Aint’cha got any heart?”

“Sorry,” Hanzo replied, watching Max put a canvas bag on his stove and pull a couple packs of cigarettes from his pockets to drop them on the counter.

“Youse is _sorry?_ Shit, Hanzo, I bout lost the family jewels t’ frostbite.” Max bitched, starting to pre-heat the oven before pulling out a foil wrapped aluminum disposable pan. Hanzo smiled softly despite himself.

Max had made them something fresh and brought it over.

Despite being so young and impulsive, Max was solid as a rock when he needed him and in the last year or so, he’d been a reliable part of Hanzo’s life. Whenever Hanzo needed something, he could count on Max to be there.

“Alright, so this won’t be ready just yet so youse is just gonna haveta wait.” Max stated with a sage nod but also pulled a tin of pirolines from his bag and handed them to Hanzo. In any other company, Hanzo would have been ashamed of how quickly his face lit up at the chocolate treats, but with Max? With Max it was worth it to see the raw pleasure of making someone’s day wash over the usually cranky hacker.

“Thank you, Max.” Hanzo cooed, picking at the plastic on the top until he just gave in and grabbed a knife to cut it open rather than trying to do it with his fingers.

“Youse is welcome.” Max preened, red-bottomed leather boots tapping across the floor as he put away the contents of the other bag before unwrapping a loaf of garlic bread he had prepared that would also have to go in the oven.

They both looked up as the water pipes creaked like they were prone to doing when someone flushed the toilet. Then the sound of the sink running.

“That must be ya stray. Is everythin’ alright? Ya feel safe, right? If youse don’t feel safe, ya better call me. _Capisce?_ Don’t evah stay round wit someone that makes youse feel unsafe. I’ll kick yer ass aftah I finish wit them.” Max’s scolding would have been more threatening had it not been so adorable coming from a pint-sized 22-year-old.

“I feel very safe, Max, I promise,” Hanzo chuckled, holding up three fingers in the boy scouts sign. “Scouts honor.”

“What the fuck _even--!_ Youse wasn’t even a boy scout!” Max’s voice raised in something halfway between amusement and annoyance.

“So?” Hanzo fought the urge to grin as he tried to play the innocently ignorant foreigner card that might just get him punched.

 _“So,”_ Max squawked, “You can't use ‘Scouts honah’ ‘cause youse was nevah a scout!”

“Are you _sure--”_

“Yes!”

“But I _could_ have been a scout…” There was no keeping the smarmy grin off his face at this point, “You don't know. I don't either, but I could have been. I feel like a scout.”

“I am gonna _strangle_ youse.” Max was doing that cute thing where he got agitated and turned red in the face, mostly in the gigantic Italian schnoz. That and the tamping of the incredibly impractical Louboutin heels made this entire thing completely worth it.

“Hey y’all, what’d I miss--” Jesse stopped as he made eye contact with Max and was frozen in his tracks. _“Max?!”_

All the color bled out of Max’s face. His back was to Jesse, looking at Hanzo as if he’d been deeply betrayed by the man. Hanzo, on the other hand, wasn’t even entirely certain of what was going on here. He couldn’t think of any reason why Jesse would know Max previously, they weren’t even from the same part of the world.

“Max, yer… _shit!”_ Jesse took the petite male and turned him around by the shoulders to look him in the eye and then smile widely. “Ya look good, yank!”

Max swallowed harshly and looked up at Jesse with his semi-clouded eyes and cracked a nervous smile. “Yeah, you too, hick.” He said and tried to shake the hands off his shoulders.

“Max, what’s the matter? Yer actin’ real shifty; I ain’t seen you in forever…” Jesse’s smile faltered as he searched over Max’s face for an answer. He even checked both sides of the ice blue-haired head to ensure that the cochlear implants were in place and that Max could, indeed, hear him--even though he had just responded in kind. “Genie?”

“I… I--” Max pulled away suddenly and swallowed again, grabbing his bag and backed up so quickly toward the door that he nearly fell over the pair of boots that Hanzo had sat beside it. 

  
“Max, what’s going on? Are you ok?” Hanzo asked, stepping closer and only spurring the hacker to stumble his way to the door with increased urgency. “Did he do something to you? How do you know him?”

Max shook his head, putting up an ungloved hand as he pulled the front door open and assaulted them with cold Pennsylvania air. “I… I’ll tell youse later. I gotta go… I gotta go--”

This wasn’t anything like the Max that Hanzo knew from work. That Max was loud, boisterous, abrasive but endearing and this? This kid was scared. He didn’t quite know what to think, except to wonder what Jesse had done to deserve this kind of a reaction from one of the most hardcore kids Han had ever met.

“Are you sure you’ll be ok?” Hanzo called, but the door was already shutting behind Max without an answer. It seemed he would have to wait until Max could text him.

It was an uneasy silence in the kitchen between the two of them, Jesse more shell-shocked than anything and Hanzo confounded by this sudden shift in Max’s personality. “What happened there just now?” Han asked, finally breaking the silence and looked Jesse in the eye. “Why was Max so afraid of you? If you did anything to him, so help me I _will--”_

“Honest t’ god, sugar,” Jesse quickly defended with both hands in the air as a surrender, “I ain’t got any idea what just happened. Last I knew, Max ‘n I was on good terms!”

Hanzo’s eyes narrowed as he tried to decide if he thought Jesse was lying to him. It didn’t seem like it... He’d been close enough to Max to know that he had cochlear implants despite them being the most discreet pair Max could find. “He didn’t seem to be on good terms with you… He seemed afraid of you.”

“I wish I had any idea why, darlin’, but I’m as in the dark as you are!” Jesse insisted, leaning against the half wall and roughly scrubbed his hand through the dark hair while searching the stained 80’s linoleum floor as if it would explain everything if he just squinted hard enough.

Hanzo believed him. The angel hadn’t given him any reason to think he was lying, however he would be keeping a closer eye on Jesse than before. Max was hard to shake, this couldn’t have just come completely out of the blue.

The oven beeped as it reached the pre-heated temperature that Max had set it to before he’d retreated. Hanzo turned around and started to try and decide how long he should leave it in. “Max’s lasangnas take 45 minutes t’ cook.” Jesse mumbled as he pushed away from the half wall and began to retreat back to the futon in the living room.

“How do you know that?” Hanzo asked as he offered the cigarettes to Jesse before he could get too far.

Jesse took the cigarettes and shakily began to tap the end against the palm of his hand. “He used to talk about cooking all the time. Said it was the thing that he missed the most.”

 

xx

 

Hanzo was starting to get really concerned for Jesse. The angel had taken his cigarettes outside onto the fire escape that doubled as a porch--after some heavy duty broom action to get the snow cleared off--and was halfway through the first pack. Hanzo had been subtly timing him between each smoke break and the longest Jesse had managed to go in between smokes had been a grand total of 25 minutes. He’d heard of chainsmokers before but he’d never actually seen one in person. Did it make a difference for his health if he was technically a divine being?

Were angels divine?

It all began to bring the ever circling questions back around to the start again. Every time Hanzo thought he knew something about angels, something new came up and changed it again. He sat on his recliner, looking out at the bundled up angel puffing away on another cigarette with a troubled expression and stabbed a bit of lasagna. Max’s lasagna was sinfully good and it was a shame the man wasn’t there to see them enjoy it.

He used ‘them’ loosely here since Jesse hadn’t eaten any of it. Despite being so hungry earlier, after that whole disaster with Max when he’d come over Jesse hadn’t eaten anything. It was if the whole fallout of Hurricane Max had left him without an appetite or desire to keep warm.

His text message history at this point now included two friends that weren’t answering his messages.

_[Hanzo 12/13/2020 1456]_

_Max? What’s going on? Talk to me._

_[Hanzo 12/13/2020 1551]_

_Max, are you ok?_

_[Hanzo 12/13/2020 1721]_

_Max, I’m serious. I’m worried. Please talk to me._

Hanzo sighed, taking another bite of pasta and meat as he watched Jesse’s blanketed silhouette in the soft green glow of the old incandescent street lamp below. The only time he saw his face, despite the male facing the building to keep warm from the wind, was when Jesse inhaled and lit up his features with the embers of yet another cigarette.

It had been hours. Even if he’d been worried about what might have transpired between Jesse and Max in the past, now he was just more concerned about what was happening with Jesse right _now._ Right now, the angel was smoking himself into a vaguely frozen stupor.

_[Hanzo 12/13/2020 1730]_

_Amélie, something happened with Max and I could really use your advice right about now. Please talk to me._

Hanzo sighed and grabbed the second plate of lasagna steaming gently beside him on the table and stood to go outside and offer it once more to the cowboy. Jesse had to be famished by now. He pulled a blanket around his shoulders and slid the sliding glass window open so he could climb out onto the fire escape and offer the plate to Jesse.

“Thanks.” Jesse mumbled, lips blue as he took another drag off of the cancer stick between his shivering fingers before putting it out in a pile of snow on one of the railings.

Han sat on one of the metal stairs that led up to the roof, waiting to see if Jesse would start the conversation. It couldn’t be easy; whatever it was had clearly become too much for either of them to handle easily. What could possibly be so traumatic that neither of them could bear to talk about it--

“I loved ‘im.” It was the first thing out of the angel’s mouth and possibly the very last thing Hanzo could have ever expected.

“Oh.” Hanzo breathed out, more of a wheeze than a word. That left more questions than answers, really. How had they even met? When? They were both so young, how exactly did two people from opposite ends of the country know each other well enough for at least one to fall in love? Did Max feel the same way? What the actual fuck was even going on anymore? He liked to write drama but _hell_ if he wanted to actually deal with it.

“What’d he say when ya talked to ‘im?” Jesse asked, taking a bite of the lasagna and closing his eyes to revel in the taste.

“He didn’t say anything to me. I’ve texted him a few times and he hasn’t texted back.” Hanzo sighed some, rubbing his face. Working his phone was a bit difficult with as cold as his fingers were but he slowly managed to navigate to the call history where all the unanswered calls to Max in the past few hours were.

_Outgoing call [12/13/2020 1701] GHOST  00:12_

_Outgoing call [12/13/2020 1530] GHOST 00:13_

_Outgoing call [12/13/2020 1410] GHOST 00:32_

_Incoming call [12/11/2020 1232] Mondatta 12:15_

_Incoming call [12/10/2020 1450] GHOST 05:32_

_Missed call [12/9/2020 1114] Landlord -- Ena 03:25_

_Outgoing call [12/8/2020 1324] Zenyatta 20:15_

He stopped scrolling through his admittedly sparse call history and sat the phone down. Sometimes he thought about actually erasing it but the call history gave him a way of making sure he wasn’t losing time. It was a digital reminder that everything was screwed on straight.

“What happened between you two?” Hanzo asked as Jesse moved to lean over the railing of the fire escape and flick his cigarette below. This time he didn’t even wait an entire minute before tapping another out of the box and lighting up again.

“If Max don’t wanna tell you, I’m not sure I should either.” Jesse frowned, face lighting up in the glow of the embers as he got a good burn going even in the cold. They’d been waiting on bated breath for hours and no more snow had started to fall. It was as good as it was likely to get and Hanzo hoped that this meant things could go back to normal. It’d still take at least a day for the city to recover from the snow that they had already received, but it seemed that the worst had passed. For now.

“But will you?” Hanzo whispered, not sure he wanted to know the answer. In this day and age, no one came without a past. Even someone as young as the angel would have scars from life taking its toll, Jesse seemed to be no exception. Hanzo stood up and walked to stand beside the other at the railing, blowing his untied hair out of his face.

The low light of the lamps below under-lit Jesse’s face highlighting his melancholy in green. Hanzo supposed his face must look similar, certainly his hair had caught the hue and picked it up like a new natural.

“No, darlin’,” Jesse finally sighed, looking over to Hanzo and quirked his lips up on the side in a heartbreakingly beautiful smile of a man in pain. “I don’t suppose I will.”

They stood there for a moment longer, shoulder to shoulder to share warmth in the night as they watched the dying light of the setting sun over the skyline of West Philly 50 feet--give or take--in the air.

Jesse finally extinguished his cig in the hearest bit of snow and flicked the butt down to the alley below as it began to get too cold for them to handle. Hanzo picked up his blankets where they’d been settling against the cold iron and helped Jesse move his blanket as well, wandering back inside as the somber feeling settled over them both.

“Jesse?” Hanzo asked, looking up at the angel as he piled his blankets in the center of the room so they could be dried with a hairdryer on the bottoms.

“Yes, sugar?” He asked, shuffling around the blankets on the futon to try and get them as thick as they could be while missing their compatriots still on the floor.

“Do you still love him?” Hanzo asked, not sure what had even possessed him to do it, but it had to be asked.

The angel smiled despite himself, looking at the floor as if it were a projection of some kind of sweet memory only he could see. It made Hanzo’s heart ache both for him and for himself. “That’s the funny thing about love, Hanzo. You never really stop lovin’ someone.”

The cell phone finally chimed with the response that Hanzo had been looking for all day. He pulled it out and was shivering so badly that it took him three tries to get the phone open; the cold and the souring feeling in his gut made the message from Max bittersweet.

_[GHOST 12/13/2020 1834]_

_I’ll talk you at work. Mondatta says he’s gonna reopen on Tuesday._


	5. Our love was a two-person game. At least until one of us died, and the other became a murderer.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Our love was a two-person game. At least until one of us died, and the other became a murderer.”  
> ― Dark Jar Tin Zoo, Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.

After the whole fiasco with Max, a strange and tense air had settled over the tiny apartment between the pair. Even though they had lulled into a lazy snow morning of idle aquarium maintenance and slow writing--as Hanzo was doing--or scrolling through a borrowed tablet for a replacement hat, there was some kind of unspoken change in the air. Knowing that someone so close to Hanzo had a position to Jesse had changed the dynamic between the pair and it didn’t seem to be resolved any time soon.

Hanzo rolled his head to the side where he’d been laying upside down on the couch with his legs over the headboard and the rest of his torso laying on the seat with his head tilted over the bottom. There was a portion of his hind brain that whispered to him that Jesse’s ex was younger than him so a man as old and rigid as Hanzo must be boring, thus the change to a more flippant and youthful pose. 

It felt weird.

As far as he knew, he’d never been this relaxed. Hanzo had always been too buttoned up for this kind of ‘relaxation’ and was more drawn up than even before. For the umpteenth time that morning since he’d settled here, Hanzo’s phone slipped from his fingers and nearly hit him in the face as it fell to the floor on the way down. The sudden noise nearly caused Jesse to jump out of the loveseat he had gotten comfortable in. It seemed Han wasn’t the only one feeling the unease.

Jesse seemed to decide, after watching Hanzo pluck the phone up and shift into a sitting position rather than upside down to let the blood run back out of his head, that he was hungry. The angel stood with a huff of air that was suspiciously close to a sigh and wandered over the dingy carpet into the kitchen. For lack of things to speak about, Hanzo had been cleaning off and on but there were some stains that would never come out of the ugly shag.

A few more idle sentences about a convoluted crime that Hanzo still hadn’t decided the conclusion for and the fridge shut. Then a cabinet opened… then shut. Another cabinet. After the fourth cabinet, Hanzo actually glanced over and lifted himself up on his hands so to peer over the half wall into the kitchen. Jesse was staring into another cabinet that was absolutely empty. Not even the can of corn that had lived in there since Hanzo’d first bought it years ago remained, Jesse had turned that into chili the night before.

The way the angel once again moved to the fridge, stared inside, checked the freezer and then cycled back told Han everything he really needed to know. They’d finally run out of food.

_Well shit._

A matching sentiment was whispered under Jesse’s breath, breaking the silence that they’d unconsciously agreed to keep most of the morning. Hanzo frowned, pulling up his phone app to check his bank account. He’d just been paid on Friday and Ena had waived the rent this month because of the extreme heating bills to cover the thin outer walls on this apartment, but that still didn’t leave him with much after all the student loans and afore mentioned heating bills. Even still, Jesse had already demonstrated that he could make a twenty dollar bill last for ages and they did have some leftover lasagna in the fridge… not much but a little. After his first plate, Jesse hadn’t seemed to be able to stomach it. 

All Hanzo’s thoughts cycled back to Max again and he frowned once more before running his fingers over the creases it caused in his cheeks and forehead. Han trained his face out of the frown quickly, not willing to show his age any more than he already had. “I think I’m going to go out for more food.” Hanzo called after pulling the quilt over the window back and out of the way so he could check the state of the roads. It was still colder than sin but the roads were mostly cleaned off and pedestrians seemed to be moving around outside again. The forecast was blessedly free of snow.

“I can eat lasagna, y’ain’t gotta do that,” Jesse started even as Hanzo moved to the door and began to hop around to pull on knee-high riding boots that Max had bought him to keep his legs dry in the high snow. Hanzo loved the fancy metal bits that covered his knees but was suspicious of the high quality of the construction--Max wasn’t the kind to buy cheap things and he really didn’t want to know how much had been spent on these boots.

“I need more food and I have to work tomorrow so,” He finished with the thought with an easy shrug. Anything to get out of this stifling house. The air in here had gotten so thick in stress that Hanzo was desperate to change locale. When had his own home become such a prison?

“I-- you--” Jesse’s mouth worked as he tried to come up with words to describe what he was thinking while Hanzo pulled on his coat and gloves. “Let me come with you.”

The entire point of this adventure was to get out of the house and away from Jesse, but the part of Hanzo that was still hopelessly enamoured with his beautiful amber eyes couldn’t help but cave under their pleading. “No, it’s not that big of a deal. Don't’ worry about it,” Han tried helplessly once more as he took out a blue winter hat and tucked his hair into it.

“Please, darlin’,” Jesse tried again, looking into the closet and taking out one of Hanzo’s other thick jackets and started to put it on regardless of his protests. “It’s my mouth yer feedin’, at least let me carry the bags.”

“That--” Well, Hanzo couldn’t deny that some part of him would probably need a dedicated pack mule if he was to restock his pantry. It was impossible to try and fight with such a good argument--he’d always had a weakness for a pretty face. He gave an exaggerated sigh as he threw his hands into the air and allowed the angel to have his way. _“Fine.”_

Jesse’s lips split into a wide grin and he grabbed a pair of gloves from the closet and started to pull them on before sliding on his own cowboy boots with a practiced ease of someone who wore them every day. “Chin up, Han-zo, it ain’t the end of the world.” He chided gently even as Hanzo pouted and the frown from before returned.

Says _him._ Hanzo was distinctly convinced that this could be the end of his world. Defeatist as that might be, he wasn’t sure of what was going on here between them and he was worried about breaking… this. Whatever this was. Could be nothing, his old therapist had always been telling him he connected to people entirely too quickly. She had barely gotten the word ‘borderline’ past her lips before he’d quickly found himself a new health professional.

“So where do ya shop?” Jesse asked, burying his face in a large knitted scarf that Amélie had made Hanzo for his ‘birthday’ years ago. He’d told her that she should have made him a single sock and she’d punched him for his trouble.

“There is a small grocery close by. I don’t want to take a subway if I can help it, the prices are comparable.” Hanzo was too self-conscious to take a bus or subway with a pile of groceries even though other people did it frequently enough. He didn’t like to be stared at; social anxiety made even a normal task such as carting home food into a great expedition into the wild west of public opinion.

“Isn’t it too cold t’ truck it through the snow?” Jesse shoved his hands into the pockets of Hanzo’s jacket and shivered lightly. “Also-- How long has this jacket been in yer closet?” He laughed, turning out the pocket that was full of lint and an odd black feather that looked like it’d been crushed by the other clothes crammed inside. Hanzo couldn’t even remember why he’d picked it up.

“Oh, months if not years,” He shrugged, pulling the hat further down his now exposed neck to keep the chill off as he once again forced the frozen outer door open and started to lead Jesse out around Thunderbird Brew.

“Ya got a bottlecap in here,” Jesse laughed, holding up a single cap for a jarritos drink he couldn’t remember purchasing. It had to have been a while longer than he’d originally thought.

“So I do,” Hanzo caught the mirth and smiled despite himself. Jesse had an infectious brightness to him and not even the surliest man in the neighborhood was immune. The bottle cap was quickly forgotten however as the angel whistled lowly under his breath and tapped a small, almost unnoticeable, sticker indicating that this shop was a licensed cannabis distributor. “Remind me t’ get coffee from _this_ joint--”

That was when he got an idea and couldn’t get it out of his head. All this fresh powder and nothing to do with it? Parts of the sidewalk hadn’t even been stepped on yet and it was a shame for it to go to waste. Hanzo smirked a bit and bent down while Jesse continued down the sidewalk and gathered up a handful of snow to pack it down into the perfect projectile. Pat it down, add more snow, give it a good squeeze, let the heat of your hands allow the crystals to melt slightly, roll it in more snow to give it the perfect hard crust with a soft powdery center. There was a lot of science behind the art of coating someone’s hair with snow.

He judged his shot, measured the weight with a couple of test tosses, let go and let it fly…

It hit the angel directly in the back of the head and got snow all down the back of the collar of his borrowed jacket.

“Sonuvabitch!” Jesse screeched, nearly ripping the jacket off to get the snow out of it before turning to level narrowed eyes at the asian man currently laughing so hard he was forced to rest his weight on his own legs.

It’d been a good shot and Hanzo couldn’t help but find it absolutely hilarious. If only he’d had a tape recorder for that _squeal._ For the first time in their interaction, Jesse’s young age was of a benefit as Hanzo could have sworn his voice cracked at the moment of impact. It was only a pity that he wasn’t ready for Jesse to return fire. The angel had stomped over to a snow drift nearby the front of a shop and scooped up a large handful of snow to form a ball. He wasn’t quite as adept as Hanzo with the perfect projectile production but what he lacked in experience, Jesse made up for in an overhand thrown with pinpoint accuracy.

Hanzo just barely managed to duck as a ball of powder came for his face, laughing harder despite himself and hit the deck to produce another snowball just as Jesse did the same. He certainly had a tactical advantage, being the one more accustomed to running in fresh powder and years of experience of tossing snow at--

Who?

The pause in his step that came from wondering where that thought was going was all it had taken for Jesse to catch up to him and grab him around the waist. “Gotcha!” The cowboy crowed, pulling them both down into the snow with his body weight and pinning Hanzo to the ground so a wad of snow could be shoved into his jacket as payback for previous crimes.

“Get off of me, you heathen!” Hanzo laughed, screeching at the cold and idly slapping Jesse’s jean covered thigh to buck the man off. Jesse complied with little nudging, falling back into the same snow he’d face-planted Han into to laugh and shove a bunch of powder at Hanzo as the man peeled his jacket off. “Don’t add insult to injury,” Han sniffed, but the tilt of his lips revealed his enjoyment of their interaction as he shook the snow out of his coat.

For the time they smiled at each other, the world seemed a little less frigid. The entire situation seemed foreign and yet as close to familiar as he’d ever been; it was doing his crush no favors.

“Yer cute when ya blush,” Jesse grinned, whiskers full of snow as he watched Hanzo pull himself to his feet and then lift the angel up as well with one hand.

“It’s the cold,” Hanzo quipped.

“Mmmhmm. So ya say, but I ain’t buying it, Sugar. I was born at night but it wasn’t _last_ night.” He grinned, winking at Hanzo who covered his mouth while hugging himself and looked away in embarrassment.

 _“Urusai,”_ Hanzo snapped even as Jesse threw his head back in a boisterous laugh. It had only taken the man less than a week to realize that Han’s usually prickly outer exterior was hiding a squishy center that seemed to actually enjoy being teased.

The rest of the trip to the market was filled with gentle jibes and the not so subtle brushing of shoulders while Jesse kept bending forward to try and get a look at Hanzo’s downcast eyes through the curtain of black hair that kept trying to fall from his hat with Hanzo shyly returning the gaze through a fan of lashes. His face remained hot as they entered the store and Jesse took his hand to pull the other toward the carts. It even managed to make Hanzo forget that Jesse had only been talking of his love for another just the night before.

At least for a moment or two, Han could allow himself to just enjoy this moment. Forgetting had always been so easy, why was it suddenly so hard?

The sullen thoughts were pushed behind a wall of amusement when the Angel took one of the carts, lined it up perfectly at the end of an aisle that ended in Tex-mex seasoning and then rode that same cart all the way to his food of choice. He looked ridiculous and Hanzo was very nearly crying at how hard it made him laugh. “Get down from there!”

“Make me!” Jesse called back over his shoulder as he almost fell on his ass when the empty cart lost momentum and the weight of him caused it to tip dangerously backward.

This wasn’t like him, Hanzo wasn’t usually this… free. Even though he didn’t remember anything before about a decade previous, Hanzo knew that since that he’d always been very withdrawn. He had done what felt natural, keeping quiet and not making comments unless asked. He had kept his head down, especially after what Sgt. Reyes had put him through, and kept contented to make good grades. _‘Don’t make waves,’_ is what he had told himself and, for all his accolades, Hanzo had done just that.

But here he was laughing loud enough to get looks from people passing by as they shopped for things that were entirely out of season and treats he rarely let himself eat. It was a ridiculous waste of money but… well, this was someone he wished to treat well.

Who _was_ he?

Money stopped mattering when Jesse turned around and began to gush about stuffing peppers with meat and cheese, talking about his momma or the lady down the street and her tamales. Apparently, this ‘Tracy’ lady had some fantastic food and quite the strong frying pan arm to hide behind should Jesse draw the ire of the older boys. He felt that warmth spreading through his chest and Hanzo knew that he couldn’t say no to Jesse unless he absolutely had nothing left to give. There was something in the very back of his head that said this was very bad but he just _didn’t care._

As they left the store, Jesse’s arms overloaded with bags and the angel again chattering about things Hanzo could barely understand much less add to, it felt like something he never wanted to let go of. Sure, reality would be knocking on his door in a few hours to remind him that Jesse couldn’t stay or to mention the age difference between them but right now… right now this was perfect.

“Let’s get a movie,” Hanzo commented, gesturing to the Redbox that was powered on once again.

Jesse looked up and quirked his head somewhat, “You still rent movies in person?” He asked as if Hanzo was silly just for suggesting it. He suddenly felt ridiculous, but the way Jesse’s lips tilted up into that coy smile allowed Hanzo to swallow his sudden embarrassment to see it for the tease that it was.

Though, this might not be the best time to mention that he also checked his emails religiously and did daily calisthenics to keep his joints from aching with age. Even though he’d hoped to keep the notion of ‘age’ from cropping up in his mind for a while longer, it seemed that it was going to take up residence whether he liked it or not.

“Only when the rental place is right there,” Hanzo sniffed and it wasn’t a lie. He didn’t go out of his way to rent even though he had… thought about it a few times. Ok, so, Google play wasn’t the first thing he thought of when he thought of movies-- so _sue_ him.

“Mmmhmm,” Jesse grinned, bumping his side to Hanzo’s shoulder and slung a warm arm around the man’s shoulders after shuffling the bags around. It felt so good that he allowed the teasing to pass by without much comment other than a soft, annoyed growl under his breath.

“Tell you what, if y’wanna get a movie y’ll have’ta truck back out here in the snow, I ain’t about t’ stop ya... but it’sa silly idea,” and Jesse wasn’t wrong. Hanzo waved a hand across his nose as if brushing the comment out of his face and tilted his nose up in a prideful moment that had little substance behind it.

“I can _also_ rent a film at home,” He sniffed, leaning ever so slightly into the arm before walking forward and leaving the cowboy to chuckle under his breath at Hanzo and his prickling reaction to feeling a fool. It was cute, the way he tilted his nose up and subtly admitted to being wrong like that. It took a bit of looking but it _was_ there. Hanzo’s smarting pride could be easily eased with a warm touch and Jesse was easy to comply with a squeeze of the shoulder underneath his arm, though that wouldn’t stop him from walking off in a huff put out for show.

Jesse moved the bags once more so the plastic wasn’t causing his fingers to lose circulation inside the gloves before walking behind Hanzo’s suddenly fast gait. When Han looked back over his shoulder to see if he was following, the man smirked to catch the angel not-so-subtly watching his ass.

It was a welcome rose-tinted light to his usually gloomy life and Hanzo couldn’t even find it in him to get upset when Jesse whistled lowly in his appreciation. The action only earned a new sway in the usually rigid walk.

 

xX

 

“So, I vote we rent _Justice League,”_ Jesse said as Hanzo settled down beside him with a bowl of microwave popcorn and glass of water. The angel had the PC-connected controller for an xbox in his hand and was scrolling through the options for rental movies on YouTube. The price for the film was pitifully low but Hanzo attributed that to it’s terrible reviews.

“Why? Everyone says it’s horrible,” Hanzo commented, secretly gleeful that he got to settle into the loveseat beside the angel because it was the only piece of furniture that faced the modestly sized monitor he'd picked up at Goodwill.

“It’s,” Jesse mulled the words over in his mind as he tried to figure out how to put it. Hanzo didn’t need him to say anything about the film, he’d already seen it and he _knew_ it was bad. Honestly, it would take a hardcore DC fanboy to say anything otherwise--even fans of the studio admitted the film was poorly done. “It’s one o’ those things that’s so bad it’s good, y’know?”

“No, I don’t.” Hanzo drawled, popping some of the snack into his mouth and raised an incredulous brow. “That’s an urban legend, things like that don’t actually exist. If it’s bad, it’s just bad. Also, apparently some kind of body snatcher took up the role of Superman and he must have come out half baked--”

Jesse made a wounded noise, grasping his chest with the arm that wasn’t slung over Hanzo’s shoulders. “It’s a good flick! It coulda used better direction but--”

“It’s a _mess,”_ Hanzo laughed, shaking his head and pulled the lever to pop the footrest out so they could get comfortable. “And I don’t know why they didn’t use the same actor that they had on the CW for the flash, he’s a better body type for it. Besides, he can sing and dance! The man was on Glee! I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think the guy they chose is plenty attractive, but Grant Gustin is just… He’s my pick for everything. I need a whole channel just for him.”

“It’s a good flick, but I won’t argue tha’ that guy needs a lot more screen time.” Jesse went so far as to stick his tongue out at Hanzo as he scrolled through Hanzo’s rental history and realized the man had watched every single Marvel Cinematic Universe film that had come out, along with the original Fox _X-men_. “Ohh, I see how it is. Yer a Marvel fan so nothin’ DC makes ‘ll ever be good enough fer ya.”

Oh no, He’s one of _those_ DC fans. Well, he was so cute before but now he was dead to Hanzo; their love was doomed and they could never be.

“I’m kiddin’,” Jesse laughed, flicking through the movies so as to look for something else they could enjoy together, “How about _Wonder Woman?_ That was better…”

Ok, Hanzo conceded, allowing himself to think that this could still work. Jesse was cute enough to warrant a house divided. “I think I could handle _Wonder Woman._ At least till we get to the end. For a studio that threw so much money at these movies, you’d think they could at least get CGI that looked decent. Also, type-cast much? I saw Ares coming from a mile off.”

The way a wide grin spread over Jesse’s face and he gleefully pressed ‘play’ on the flick made the whole thing worth it. “Again: so bad it’s good!” He reminded Han as he settled back into the loveseat and returned to lazily holding his impromptu roommate around the shoulders. Hanzo tossed a few more bits of popcorn into his mouth and reached out to flick off the light of the tall lamp saved from a local garbage bin and given a bit of love and a home-made shade. For a while he almost felt normal, almost human here with this man that was as far from human as one could possibly be.

Hanzo wasn’t sure exactly when he’d fallen asleep but at some point he must have nodded off. The combination of warmth from Jesse, the low murmur of the movie and his companion’s steady breathing had him letting his head slowly lower to rest on Jesse’s broad shoulder before his eyes drooped shut and the rest of his body followed along that inevitable descent into sleep.

As surreal as the last day had seemed, both with its’ easy romance and general shenanigans, Hanzo should have expected that it couldn’t last. Nothing good ever lasted long for him and this was no different--as soon as he had closed his eyes the everpresent nightmare returned for another tour of duty behind his eyelids.

It wasn’t as if Hanzo hadn’t tried to have romantic relations before with others, and to some degree he had even succeeded here and there, but this was where the buck stopped. When they slept beside him and the dreams woke them both up it wasn’t long before they were out the door.

_“Hanzo, no! Please, what are you doing?!”_

The nightmare always stayed the same. Always, it never changed and yet…

_“Why’d ya do this t’ me, darlin’? Ain’t I been good t’ ya?”_

As if to fly directly in the face of everything he’d become accustomed to, it was _different._ Tawny brown wings laid broken in the snow just as they had been when he’d found Jesse, the darkness of the alleyway surrounded by the tunnel of panic coursing through his veins. This was dream, alright, but the face was different than before. _The dream was different than before._

It’d been an entire decade of putting up with the same self-inflicted horror and it seemed all it required was him to get close to a different angel to warp it into a new layer of his own personal hell. Past him must have done something particular heinous to deserve this delayed karma reaction; something as bad as, oh say, killing an angel?

‘No, no, no-- Jesse, go back for him! Jesse, please, no! Don’t leave him there!’ It was always painful when his body turned away, pulling him kicking and screaming away from the angel laying broken in the snow. This time he could feel the hot tears streaming down his cheeks in real life and he could just barely get his head above the surface of lucidity before being drug once more under the tide of unconscious terror. The cold succumbing to a fight or flight response that demanded he scream in a fresh grating pain. Not again, not another, please, no--

_“Hanzo-- Why?”_

Because he couldn’t stop it. Because when this happened he was an outsider looking in. Because he wasn’t in control.

_Because after it was over he’d forget it ever happened._

“NO!” Hanzo roared, panting heavily as he hurled himself into a sitting position in bed so fast he nearly toppled up and out. He looked around with wide eyes in the darkness of the bedroom, trying to pick details out of the darkness with his panic-blown eyes. Nothing but the soft glow through the blanket on his window and the blinking alarm clock beside the bed.

_0435_

The man pat down his chest, wiping sweat off the skin and then raised the sheet to rub his face free of perspiration to allow the cold air underneath. His skin pebbled up with the chill and he continued to pat around. Where were his glasses? He needed those to see. Well, that was a lie, his eyes weren’t that bad but ever since he could remember they’d acted as a sort of safety blanket. The thick rims were just the right size that if he tilted his head down just right, he could completely obscure someone’s face… Where were they?

His confusion was interrupted by a phone call that nearly caused him to jump directly out of his skin. The phone beside him lit up and cast a bright white light over the room as he frantically threw himself at the side table to reach over it and answer the contraption. After very nearly falling out of the bed and disturbing the other person in the bed he flipped the ‘answer’ slide before he even bothered to check who it was. No one called him without a reason, especially at this time of night. Hanzo was half convinced that the telemarketers hadn’t even figured out what his number was. Perhaps it was too new?

“Hello..?” He rasped, flushing darkly to realize how bad his voice sounded. Honestly, his voice sounded like how all of this looked. It was his saving grace that no one on the phone could see his disarray.

“Get up, Hanzo.” It was Amélie. She hadn’t been heard from in nearly two days and now she was calling him out of the blue and telling him to get up? He needed better friends.

“What--” He questioned but the woman cut him off, interrupting his thoughts.

“Get _up,_ Hanzo. It’s important. Turn on your computer and look at the local news. Right now.”

“I don’t--”

_“Now, Hanzo!”_

Hanzo blinked a few times and then got out of bed. He cursed a few times as he tripped over clothes in the floor but then pulled on some underwear from a drawer and his robe before wandering down the hall to the computer to get it on. As he wandered into the front room, he smiled to see Jesse still in the loveseat. They’d changed to Netflix at some point of the night and it was now set on the ‘Are you still watching?’ screen overlaying the beautiful grinning face of David Tennant on The Crown. That show was still one of his favorite historical dramas--

“Have you done it?”

“Yeah, yeah, give me a second… I have to wait for it to boot up. Where have you been?” He questioned, squinting against the bright monitor as he pinned the phone between his ear and shoulder and logged into the system.

“I’ve been where I’ve always been.” Amélie’s voice responded.

“That isn’t an answer!”  Hanzo snarled as he waited for the homepage for 6ABC to load up. Amélie had been running him around for years but she’d never been this hard to pin down before. What could possibly be so important that it was worth dragging him out of bed at four thirty in the fucking morning?

That. _That was what was so important._

He read the headline over and over again, ‘DEATH IN THE SNOW: BODY FOUND SLAIN IN FRONT OF A LIBRARY.’

He scrolled down and realized the library was where he worked, eyebrows furrowing. Authorities weren’t disclosing the identity of the deceased yet--

Wait, what was that? Hanzo squinted at the screen while blowing up one of the photos that included an evidence bag. The deceased had been running and broke a heel--

The sole of it was red.

  



	6. While I thought I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "While I thought I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die." Leonardo Da Vinci

All at once, time stood still and sped imperceptibly fast. The warmth of the previous day spent with Jesse was stripped back, exposing his soul to the frigid shock and horror. Hanzo felt his blood run cold and a wash of dread slide down his neck as he stood there, staring with wide and unfocused eyes at the computer. It couldn’t be Max, _couldn’t be._ Max would have been safe, at home, and nowhere near the library at whatever hour this was. He should have gone _home._ Hanzo’s body had moved on autopilot, getting dressed in warm clothing and leaving a half-baked note for Jesse on the counter of the kitchen where he could find it, losing track of the time. It didn’t matter what time it was, time no longer held any meaning here.

That’s the thing about tragedy; it has terrible timing.

 _‘Have to go._ ~~_ごめんなさい.’_ ~~ He had struck through the apology in messy Japanese to add one in equally disjointed Latin script on the back of an old receipt and just sat it on the counter. Had he been in his right mind, Hanzo would have worried about Jesse even finding it amongst the other various detritus on his ugly Formica counters, but for now it was amazing he even remembered to warn his pseudo-roommate. This whole situation had become a trainwreck; Hanzo didn’t want to see it but couldn’t look away.

It was still dark outside, of course it was, when Hanzo left the house with little more than his keys and phone, running down the stairs and out into the night. The insulated hoodie he’d just thrown on as it was the first thing he’d seen did very little to stop the cold, wet air from seeping straight into his bones and made his fingers numb enough to match how numb he was everywhere else. He ran, making his way through the freshly plowed snow, barely feeling the ache in his legs and chest through the ache in his heart. Despite all that had happened, with Jesse and everyone else, Max was his friend. Max had _always_ been his friend; even when Hanzo hadn’t deserved his friendship.

When Max had first come to the Library, they had all just ignored him for the most part. He’d been a rich brat, spoilt rotten who got off easy by working community service instead of going to jail. They’d all thought, at least at first, that jail was where he’d belonged. Those first few months, Hanzo had done everything he could to avoid him. For months they’d all just pretended he didn’t exist to his face and did nothing but talk about him behind his back. Max knew, he always knew when they’d done something, there was no way he couldn’t have known.

In the low light of the street lamps, the crystals in the snow shimmered and glittered, reflecting the foggy green fluorescent up into his face. The world was still and quiet, far removed from the turmoil in his mind. _What would he tell Jesse?_ As Hanzo approached the flashing lights of Police and news stations with their huge antenna booms extended above the vans, Hanzo shoved his way through the reporters to try and get closer to the scene. He had to see it for himself.

They’d taped it off so far out that he could barely see anything but a drape over someone small enough to be Max and little yellow evidence tags all over the front steps. He hadn’t honestly expected to get this close, from this vantage he could barely see Zenyatta and Mondatta standing near the doors of the library being questioned by one of the policemen on the case. They’d always been Hanzo’s rock in hard times, never letting the petty troubles of life affect them and staying calm even in the worst of times.

Zenyatta moved a hand over his mouth and heaved a sob that Hanzo couldn’t hear from here, turning into his Master’s chest. The older monk raised a hand to cup the base of Zen’s shaved head, his lips twisting in pain. In this light, Hanzo could just barely see the shimmers of something wet against his cheeks.

Hanzo struggled to rip his eyes away from them both and back to the taunting black bag laying in the snow that commanded the respect of all around it. It couldn’t be ignored, demanding attention.

It had to be someone else, it couldn’t be Max. It _couldn’t_ be. Ten years in this new reality and Hanzo had never experienced someone so close to him dying; Max was too young to die. Max would have enjoyed knowing that he could no longer be pushed to the wayside and ignored, but this wasn’t the way it was meant to happen.

“I was hoping to see you here,” Hanzo’s back stiffened and he turned to see Sgt. Reyes standing there in a thick leather jacket and black beanie. He was every inch the same asshole who had come to bother him not a few days previous. Despite the fresh corpse on the ground, he managed to wear a smarmy grin that sparked heat in Hanzo’s cold blood. How _dare_ he smile at a time like this? “Come back to take another look at the crime?”

Hanzo grit his teeth and looked away, refusing to give the man any ammunition for his crazed theories. Max was his friend, why would he--

_Why would anybody do this to him?_

‘Some find living to be the challenge,’ Some part of Hanzo’s mind whispered softly, a younger voice he couldn’t quite put his finger on but knew better than his own. ‘What did he know? What did he _find?’_ Max dug up information all the time, directly defying his probation with access to the internet, there was no telling what he might have found. He stared through the detective, wondering if that was the case or if he were looking too closely at something that was little more than a mugging gone terribly wrong.

“Awh, you gonna ignore me?” Gabe chuckled, puffing on a cigarette and raising an eyebrow. “Wanna see it? The body, I mean. We’re not technically supposed to but I think for the killer, we could make an exception...”

“I-- no! What?! What the fuck is wrong with you?!” His terms of silence had been short-lived. How could this man ask that of him? How could he think Hanzo would have killed him? Why would he want to see the dead body of his friend? What--

“We need an identification. The body didn’t have any on it. I’m pretty sure it's one of your friends, but if you could identify him then I could start trying to find a next of kin.” Gabriel exhaled smoke and the confident shape of his shoulders rounded a bit while he rubbed the back of his neck. Graveyard humor didn’t suit the situation; He’d overstepped his bounds. “I know you two were good friends. I’m sorry.”

He didn’t believe it, not even a little. Gabriel Reyes had been such an asshole, every memory he’d ever had with the policemen had been like this. He assumed that Hanzo had killed someone and treated him like a second class citizen even though he’d never done anything wrong. This police officer had been making his life a living hell on a hunch for years and it all bubbled up today.

_“What’sa matta Hanzo?” Max asked, kneeling in front of his co-worker. He didn’t have any reason to be nice to any of them, not with the way they talked or gossiped, and yet--here he was. Hanzo didn’t know what to think about him with his fancy fashion brands and white-collar crimes. Somebody like him probably didn’t have any time for somebody like him. Max always did love to prove someone wrong._

“Who gave you the _right_ to apologize for this? Like you deserve some kind of forgiveness for your behavior? You don’t know me, Reyes.” Hanzo snarled, feeling the heat coming up to his cheeks and a fog filling his eyes. Gabriel Reyes didn’t know him well enough to accuse him of murder and then try to half-ass mend relations with this utter bullshit. Hanzo reached over the divider just enough to nearly jam his finger into the man’s sternum but stopped just short. If he touched the policeman, they could charge him for something ridiculous like battery and assault.

“Don’t you dare try to backpedal now. My friend is dead and if you’ve got the audacity to accuse me of murder, you should have the audacity to suffer whatever verbal abuse I have to offer. That’s the least of what an honor-less swine like you can do.” Hanzo reached up and rubbed his cheeks with the back of his hand, swallowing thickly through tears that he hadn’t asked for and ripped the yellow tape up. “You want an identification? Fine, but don’t pretend to be anything less than the asshole you are while we do it. I don’t want your apologies, you don’t have the _right.”_ He heaved, entire body taught with the effort that it took to scream at Gabriel through the stress of it all.

That body, no matter what it looked like, wasn’t Max. It couldn’t be, Max was the man, the ghost, not a collection of two-hundred some bones and a bunch of sinew. As they got close, Hanzo took in the broken Louboutin heel in the snow, blood-red against the sparkling white dunes and the footsteps of investigators as they walked from place to place. Gabriel knelt down and unzipped the bag, but Hanzo couldn’t look. All the white hot rage that coiled in his chest twisted down into something far more sinister right between his shoulder blades--Max was out there because of him and he couldn’t look. He had to turn and cover his mouth, inhaling the sharp cold air through his nose just to keep it together.

_“I… I go to John’s Hopkins for school and in return they use me as a guinea pig,” Hanzo struggled to explain through it all. “Sometimes they do CT scans on me or other experimental radiology to try and locate the source of my amnesia. This time they located a growth, in the occipital. They don’t know if it’s malignant but it’s affecting the way my brain interprets optic and occipital data. Apparently, whatever that means. I’m broken--more than before.”_

Amelie was there, standing off to the side talking to a blond investigator. The man was taller than her and had broad shoulders with a military cut, though he was looking over a case file on his laptop rather than looking at her. Hanzo focused on that instead of what was inside the bag; _what_ not _who._ It could never be Max. Hanzo’s eyes roamed from Amelie to the snow around the bag as he tried to force himself to look inside. 

“I figured you’d have a special interest in this,” Gabriel went on, “It looks like your friend wasn’t all that he said he was.”

Hanzo’s eyes snapped to the fact that the snow around the bag was flattened out in a long shape that went either way horizontal to where Max laid, presumably, on his back. It took a second and a few steps back to really take stock of what the shapes were with the low contrast. It was hard to distinguish, but, they looked suspiciously like the outline of wings.

He looked back at Reyes who was holding out a long, icy-blue feather.

...what?

Since when did Reyes even believe in Angels? For years, Hanzo had been trying to convince him that what he dreamed every night was true and the detective had thrown it casually to the wayside, and yet here and now he offered up a feather. Today made less and less sense with each passing moment; it felt like some kind of horrible nightmare and every fiber of Hanzo’s being wished that it was.

_“So… does that mean youse’s got cancer?” Max asked, sitting heavily into the chair beside Hanzo and stared at the same impressionist painting above the receptionist desk that Hanzo himself was hoping would magically produce some answers. “Are ya gonna die?” He attributed Max’s lack of tact to something between being from New Jersey and his full-disclosure personality._

_“I’m not sure. I don’t know what to do, Max…”_

_“Go fer a walk,” The young man shrugged easily, staring up at the fresco that had seen better days painted on the domed ceiling of the Library. “That’s what I do, when I’m really lost. It don’t help my health or really make the problem go away but it’ll make youse feel better… that’s gotta be worth somethin’.”_

Hanzo didn’t want to touch it. He was afraid if he touched the feather, he’d be somehow implicated in a murder he didn’t commit. Rage became fear borne of a cycle of suspicion; Reyes would do whatever it took to get his man. “I don’t feel comfortable taking that,” He whispered in a tone barely audible whisper over the din of police and reporters currently clamoring to get close and pick up what they were saying. He had caused this; he was the reason Max had been out taking a walk instead of safe in his own home.

“Fair,” Gabe commented, twirling it in his fingers with a raised eyebrow. It reminded Hanzo of a cat playing with a mouse, letting the mouse think that it was free before batting at it again. Reyes dropped it into an evidence bag and pulled the anti-tamper seal, locking the feather inside. “Feathers are notoriously hard to get fingerprints off of, if you’re curious.”

Not anymore they weren’t. Hanzo couldn’t figure out why the investigator was giving out this kind of information, especially if it was wrong. “They made breakthroughs in fingerprint lifting in 2015 to use against poachers,” Hanzo sniffed. It was one of the many things he’d looked up on a whim for a story and here it was getting thrown back into his face.

The smirk that slid over the Sargent’s face was both impressed and troubling. Hanzo didn’t like impressing Reyes, particularly not in this field. If he played dumb, the detective suspected him; if he admitted knowledge of any kind, the detective suspected him. There was no winning in this vicious cycle. “I didn’t know you knew so much about CSI, Doe” Reyes prompted but he got no return for his probing. 

“I write novels on the side, I know a lot of random things about a lot of random things. None of it is your business, or an implication of guilt. I’m invoking the 5th amendment, if you want to arrest me for a crime, you’ll have to read me my rights.” Hanzo had been subjected to his bullshit on so many occasions that he had memorized how to get Gabriel to back off--sometimes it even worked.

 _“My mom died when I was young,” Max volunteered, looking past where he was spinning his thumbs together in his lap to stare at the floral oversized boots he wore. They’d been sitting there silently for what felt like hours with the ticking of the huge clock behind them as the only way of signalling the movement of time. His blas_ _é_ _response to Hanzo’s worries had stifled the air between them and caused it to settle into a tight silence._

_“I don’t remember much about it, not really, yanno? I was only nine ‘r ten.” Hanzo wondered where he was going with this, but didn’t interrupt. The kid had barely spoken to anyone before this, mostly keeping to himself in the Library. “She was the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen… She never had any hair, it fell out ‘cause of the treatments, but that never mattered. She had hands that could hold the world together, words that caused pain t’ just go away and her kisses were magic…”_

_It hadn’t occurred to Hanzo before now that perhaps he’d been too scared. Max had moved from twiddling his thumbs to wringing his hands during the conversation, revealing how uncomfortable he was. Despite all that, Max was trying to help._

_“I miss her every day.” She sounded like she’d been his entire world._

“Are you ever going to identify this corpse?” Gabe stated blandly, gesturing to the bag with a raised eyebrow. Hanzo felt a wave of nausea roil in his stomach at the way the detective reduced his friend to nothing more than a pile of flesh to be tagged and bagged then sent back to the morgue.

 _“Don’t_ call him that,” Hanzo spat, swallowing down the bile as his world shifted and he threatened to teeter to the ground. “He’s not some… some… pile of _meat_ for you to dissect. He’s my _friend._ He’s just a kid.” _Just a kid,_ not even old enough to rent a fucking car on his own--barely old enough to drink--and this wasn’t supposed to happen to good kids just trying to turn their shitty lives back around. He had his entire life ahead of him still.

Every step toward the body bag was a struggle. Hanzo slowly drug his eyes down to the face against the dark, ice-blue hair flared out like a halo and wicking up the thick blood that matched the traces on his lips. He looked calm, more peaceful than Hanzo thought he had ever seen him. No trace of the worries foisted on a kid entirely too young; there was no Eugene Spencer, Sr. here to plague his every memory. With his eyes closed, Hanzo could imagine clear brown eyes that saw everything in perfect clarity instead of the ashen and scarred orbs. He could imagine that Max would wake at any time with unharmed ears, only to complain that ‘they’se was bein’ too loud.’

A Max as Max was meant to be; perfect, spunky, and _alive._

In another life, this Max was just posing for one of those fashion books he loved so much, not laying in a puddle of his own coagulated blood. There was something certainly editorial about the ashen pallor in his face. “Yeah--” Hanzo choked on the word, letting out a sound that was more sob than word as he turned away to wipe the tears away. There was no wiping them away, they fell too quickly and left pock-marks in the freshly fallen snow.

_“I’m sorry about your mother, Max.” Hanzo whispered, wondering how this conversation had led here._

_“Don’t be sorry, Hanzo, that wasn’t why I told youse… whenever I used t’ get sad or upset, she’d always tell me somethin’ that I don’t think I’ll ever forget,” Max smiled softly, leaning forward in the chair to look up at Hanzo’s downturned eyes. “She was real sick and she knew that she was gonna die, Hanzo. We didn’t know when, but she knew. She used’ta say to me,_ Finché c'è vita c'è speranza.”

“That’s--” Hanzo sucked air through his nose so fast that it burned the inside in a desperate bid to stop the tears that escaped despite backing up so fast he nearly crashed into the snow backwards. “That’s Max. That’s--” 

“What’s his real name, do you know?” Gabe asked and for once, his voice was gentle and he kept his distance. Hanzo wondered how anyone could still think that he was capable of this, even as the sobs shook him so hard that they became dry heaves against the chatter of voices filtering across the street. “I’m looking for his next of kin.”

“He doesn’t _have_ any next of kin,” Hanzo snarled, turning on his heel to look the policeman in the eye through his pain. “His mother is dead and his father did _that_ to him.”

_“What’s it mean?” Hanzo asked softly, slowly raising up to really look the kid in the eye. That was the first time he’d seen the soft, hairline scars around Max’s eyes under a soft layer of powder and the way his cornea seemed to warp around large patches of blue-gray haze. Hanzo had never noticed that he was almost blind._

_“‘Where there is life, there’s hope.’” Max translated, offering him a cheeky little smile. “As long as yer still kickin’, you’ve got a chance, ‘n ya shouldn’t mourn the dead. They’re at peace, Handsoap. Don’t evah let anybody tell ya any different--not even that nasty little voice in the back of yer head. Live your life; as long as yer still there, you’ve got a chance.” He spoke like someone who routinely had to tell that voice to shut its lying mouth._

“I still need a real name,” Gabe pushed as gently as he ever was, lips twisted into a tight line. _Frustration,_ his mind helpfully provided. “Please.”

“Eugene,” Hanzo scoffed, “He hated it. Eugene Maximilion Spencer. _Junior.”_  Max had lived his entire life with that bastard’s name stuck to him even after everything that had happened and now even in death, it would follow him to the grave.

_“Thanks, Max.” Hanzo smiled, despite himself. “I didn’t know you spoke Italian…”_

_“I’m a guido from Jersey, Hanzo,” Max scoffed, throwing the derogatory slang like someone who had already come to terms with it long ago, “Of course I speak Italian. I make a mean lasagna too.”_

_“I don’t know what that is, but I’ll have to try it sometime.” Hanzo smiled despite himself, catching whatever stubbornly contagious optimism Max was peddling._

_“Oh youse is gonna love it.”_

“Go home, Doe,” Reyes sighed, rubbing his goatee and scrubbing at the jawline. “They closed the library today because we can’t let anyone in.”

‘Go home,’ as if it were that easy. If he went home then he’d have to tell Jesse what had happened. At some point he’d have to admit to himself what had happened. No, he needed to talk to Zenyatta. He couldn’t be alone in that cold apartment right now, not today; not after this.

Gabriel reached out and grabbed him even as Hanzo turned to walk toward the pair of monks on the steps, causing Hanzo to yelp out and instinctively feel for his phone in his back pocket so he could record the incident for posterity. “I’m serious, Hanzo. You need time to cope with this and this entire area is going to be on lock down for a while. Go. Home.”

_“Hey Max?”_

_“Yeah, Hanzo?”_

“I don’t want to be alone…” Hanzo whispered out, speaking the truth almost absent mindedly. It was hard to see through the thick haze of tears--it was hard to think through the litany of ‘No, it can’t be true’ that rang like a klaxon in his mind.

“Then don’t be alone, just don’t be here,” Gabe stated firmly, letting go and holding both of his hands up and out in a motion of surrender as Hanzo flicked his camera on with the tell-tale sound of video recording. “This is an active crime scene and you’re all potential witnesses which means its best if you don’t talk.”

“Sounds like a cover-up.” Hanzo snapped, rubbing his arm roughly against the side of his jeans in a desperate bid to rid himself of the feel of those fingers wrapped around his wrist.

_“If you could have anything in the world, what would it be?” Hanzo didn’t imagine a kid with as much wealth as Max could want for anything but he was curious._

_“Time.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...and now, I'm on Hiatus for NaNoWriMo 2018!
> 
> I love you all, I'll be back in time to post some Christmas fluff! Don't forget to comment because I literally subsist on your reactions ;;


	7. Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves." - Henry David Thoreau

Ambling back to his home felt as if it took three times longer than it had to walk to the library.

Hanzo walked down the still dark streets, illuminated less than the crime scene had been with its megawatt spot lights and flashing cherries, trying to assess what he’d just witnessed. The shock and anger that had hit him so fiercely in the moment had dulled down to nothing. Everything felt bland, as if he were trying to feel the world through a thick gauze of wool. It was fluff so thick it’d found its way in his ears, nose and throat.

The coffee shops smelled less enticing, passing conversation was barely audible, every time he tried to swallow it was around a lump of  _ agony _ that pulsed behind his shoulder blades, hidden in the dampening softness. Was this what loss felt like?

He watched someone die every night in his dreams and it had never felt like this. That was another life, another person. Genji was someone he only thought he knew; Max had been someone that picked him up when he fell and wiped the tears away. Loss was all encompassing; it was everywhere and nonexistent. This pain was a tangible ghost of a soul departed.

_ ‘Enough poetry,’ _ Hanzo shook his head and tried to clear it of the melancholy. Max wouldn’t have wanted him sad; he would have wanted him  _ angry. _ The problem was that Hanzo could barely feel anything at all. Even the biting early morning winds were barely registered. He tipped his head back to stare up at the stars that had just begun to vanish in the barest fog of light on the horizon. It wasn’t strong enough to put the streetlights out. They made the whole world feel as though it was being viewed through a night vision glass with the aging plastic covers tinting the light green.

How much differently could today have been if Max had contacted him sooner? If he could’ve spoken to his friend or convinced him to come back around to help with the lasagna? What would it have taken to save a life?

Hanzo forced another step and closed his eyes just to listen to the sounds of morning commute. Today there could have been another voice among those chattering and the distinct clicking of ridiculous heels on cement instead of silence. Today could have been different.

Questioning the ‘what if’s was what led people to live in grief forever. The article that Google had helpfully provided for him to read on the way home reminded that stages of grief were a mess of emotions and the only way to work through them was to deal with them. He wondered if this was bargaining, if so he was ahead of schedule.

As he walked down the street toward his home, something caught the corner of his eye. A spot of green hair and a face he barely recognized.  _ ‘It couldn’t be.’ _ Genji was dead. Genji had been dead for a long time. He killed him  _ personally, _ there’s no way it could be him. Hanzo rushed to the street, searching through the traffic for the face he’d seen so clearly looking back at him. Genji was dead. Genji was  _ dead. _

He barely slipped through the gap between a bus and an oncoming car, stopping to stare at himself in the reflection of a dark tinted window on a parked SUV. This car had been treated with some kind of anti-frost and the resulting surface was nearly a window. Under the green haze of street lamps, Hanzo stared at himself in the mirror. For just a second, Genji stared back.

_ ‘Onii-san! Let’s get ramen, ah?’ _

Nausea hit him in the gut. Hanzo gripped his mouth and looked away, closing his eyes as if that would help.

_ ‘If ya love somebody, ya make ‘em fresh pasta.’ _

He felt like he was about to topple over. Hanzo swallowed the bile and stumbled onto the nearby sidewalk, sitting there on the old snow that cracked and popped under his weight and began to sob. He couldn’t remember anything about his old life but  _ damn _ if his memory didn’t rush to fill in the pain of losing someone he loved.

There was a clatter of some change falling to the ground beside him while the commuters walked by. He pried open his tear-swollen eyes and looked down. Someone had thought he was begging, sitting there crying on the street and somehow it was the most fitting thing he could imagine. He was begging, but money couldn’t purchase refund for a lost soul.

_ ‘C’est la vie, mon chou.’ _

Such is life, indeed. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and, despite his pride begging him not to, picked up the change and shoved it into his pocket. There had to be something else he could do with his time that didn’t involve sobbing on a street corner.

He settled for walking into a local antique shop that opened early, browsed their wares though there was nothing he could afford to buy in there. The same bow sat on the back shelf that had caught his eye every time he’d come in. A simple recurve bow with long arms, a dragon shaped counterweight and a long orange ribbon tied around the handle. If he could’ve afford the price tag, he would’ve bought it years ago. It was almost as if it was waiting for him.

It always felt wrong to leave the bow there, but he always did. Hanzo made the rest of the walk home by some miraculous fate without any other incidents and decided to set about cleaning and changing Soba’s tank.

His therapist had suggested working on an aquarium as a sort of relaxation technique. To a certain degree, it did help. Soba didn’t like it very much when he began to drain the tank but Hanzo would never let it get further than half-way. It was just so he could add clean and treated water.

The theme of the tank had always been mountains. He used stones and exceptionally small plants to make his range so that Soba appeared to be a huge dragon flying between their peaks. He’d shifted the stones around many times but this time, they refused to sit correctly. Nothing he did seemed to help. Hanzo shifted and turned and even laid them on their sides but they refused to do what he wanted them to.

Not that he knew what he wanted them to do at this point.

Frustration began to gather under his ribs as location after location proved futile. This was usually satisfying and kept him interested for an entire day but his mind kept returning to what had happened. He couldn’t just text Max any more. The cranky hacker wouldn’t be at work any more to tell him how bad he was with computers. Who would fix Zenyatta’s fried motherboards? Max was abrasive as all hell, but he’d been Hanzo’s friend.

He pulled away and grabbed his razor to start cleaning the glass. Soba likely wouldn’t like it if he raised the salinity of the water with his tears. Hanzo just wanted to stop crying. Twenty minutes without crying and maybe his heart would stop aching.

Soba’s tank was re-filled with only half of his scene completed. After that, Hanzo just couldn’t focus on it any more.

He wandered idly through the apartment for a while. There were a few times he even cleaned up the mess that tended to naturally spring up around his computer. Some days he wondered if it didn’t just sprout from the desk. Hanzo had sat at said desk staring at an empty document that he’d promised his loyal commenters would’ve been written a week ago. He wrote that first sentence six different ways before erasing it entirely and just resting his head against the table.

Nothing held his attention for more than a few seconds and all he wanted to do was lay down. If he closed his eyes, Genji would be back but if he left them open he saw Max everywhere. It was a catch 22.

Where was Jesse? When he’d gotten home and the bounty hunter hadn’t been there, Hanzo hadn’t questioned it. Jesse had gained a liking for going to the coffee shop downstairs early in the morning and Hanzo usually went with him but that never took this long. He changed the position of his head to look out the window. The sun was as high in the sky as it ever got in mid-December. Out of morbid curiosity, Hanzo checked his phone for the time.

9:47 AM.

[One Unread Message]

He frowned at the display, sitting up as he opened up the phone. He hadn’t had any messages that morning when he’d left for the crime scene, when did this come in?

Hanzo’s heart stopped when the inbox opened and the details registered in his head.

_ [GHOST 12/15/2020 1015] _

_ Greetings from beyond the grave. If you’re reading this, it means I’m dead. _

He let out a shaky breath as he held the phone and stared at it with wide eyes. What the hell was going on? This was sent several hours after Max’s body was found cold and dead in the snow. It didn’t make any sense--

How was he receiving these messages and why?

The writer in him realized that it was a deadman switch before anything else could even fully grasp what was going on. Somewhere, somehow, Max had designed a program that ticked off every day and if he didn’t reset it, it would send the messages. Today, he wasn’t there to input the code. Simple, genius,  _ Max. _

The read receipt must have been what triggered the next messages to be sent because not long after Hanzo had opened it up, two more came in quick succession after.

_ [GHOST 12/15/2020 1110] _

_ Before you ask, there are no tapes. I’m not going to drag you through some kind of shit, you should know me better than that. Plus, I wouldn’t kill myself. _

_ This is a warning and a wakeup call. _

_ You’re losing time, Handsoap. _

Losing time? What? What was Max talking about? There was no possible way he could be losing time. He’d kept a log and he’d know if they didn’t line up. Surely, he of all people, would be able to tell if something was missing from his memory.

The next message was an MMS in two parts. The first one was Hanzo, plain as day, in his pajamas and house shoes carrying what looked like a body. There was a timestamp in the corner. ‘December 9th, 2020. 0148 AM.’ The second part was a message.

_ [GHOST 12/15/2020 1111] _

_ Make a wish. _

Hanzo was still sitting on the couch staring dumbly at the floor when Jesse finally came in the front door, grunting in effort as he hauled groceries in. The angel had gone to the store with his newfound financial freedom. Once the signal and banks had opened back up, Jesse was able to access his accounts here on the east coast and go out for supplies.

When Jesse put the bags down and called his name, Hanzo barely registered the sound through the ringing in his ears. Max was dead but he wasn’t gone. Max had contacted him.

This had to be some kind of elaborate prank.

It was nothing in the world but elaborate photoshop and the world’s most fucked up prank. Jesse’s face came into focus. The angel was kneeling in front of him. He tried to catch Hanzo’s barely focused orbs with his own, snapping his fingers. “Hanzo, darlin’, are you ok?”

“No.” Hanzo’s response sounded garbled in his own ears. Jesse frowned and looked over his face before vanishing from sight. It could have been a few minutes or a few hours, at this point Hanzo couldn’t even begin to tell which. When Jesse returned, he tried to take Hanzo’s phone from him.

All the stalled out thoughts that had been sluggishly running in the back of his mind hit all at once and Hanzo ripped his phone back and held it to his chest.

Jesse backed up with both hands up beside his head. He looked both concerned and a little scared; Hanzo hadn’t meant to cause that. He’d never meant to scare Jesse.

“Whoa, Sug’, what’s goin’ on?” Jesse kept himself low to the ground with both hands up to slowly try approaching again. Hanzo felt at once both a spooked animal and a noncompliant negotiator.

“Max is dead.” The words tumbled out before he could even try to stop them. Jesse looked away but it wasn’t fast enough for Hanzo to miss his face twisting.  _ ‘Max’s dead and he’s still talking to me. What do I do, Jesse? Did you know him better? What’s going on--’ _

“Where’ve you been?” He hadn’t meant the question to sound so accusatory. Everything felt as if it’d been tilted ever so slightly to the right. It was all the same and yet completely different. His house wasn’t his house anymore, nothing made any sense.  _ You’re losing time. _

“I went to the store.” Jesse said softly, gesturing back to the bags by the door. There was an emotion just behind the concern that Hanzo couldn’t place. “I went to the bank ‘n got some money.”

“I didn’t work today,” Hanzo swallowed sharply, shoving his phone into his back pocket. Something in the back of his mind was sounding a blaring klaxon. ‘Don’t tell him’, it said. He didn’t know what possessed him to listen to it. Self preservation had always taken good care of him. What was he preserving himself from?

“I gathered that, darlin’.” Jesse made a weak attempt at laughing, pushing a hand through his hair. While he’d been out, he’d picked up a thick Carhartt jacket. Hanzo wanted to laugh at how predictably cowboy it was with the new leather hat and blue jeans but it died in his throat and escaped a garbled sob.

“Max is  _ dead.” _ Hanzo repeated himself. There were no tears left to cry and his mutinous eyes decided to cry anyway.

“I know,” Jesse fell onto the couch beside him, staring at the blank portion of wall where most would’ve had a television. He’d forgotten to take off his boots at the door and an irrational anger bubbled up in Hanzo at the wet spots on his rug. “I was still on his notify list, ‘pparently. I’ve been out just… walking around trying t’ clear my head.”

Hanzo stood up, walking quickly to his kitchen to pull paper towels off the roll--more than he really needed--and stomped back to the rug to start dabbing up the moisture. “Take off your shoes.”

Jesse complied with a soft apology, pulling off his boots and setting them away from the area rug Hanzo was trying to get clean. “D’ you have to do that right now?”

He looked up at Jesse, seeing and not seeing him. “It’ll stain if I don’t.”

“Let it stain, darlin’. C’mere ‘n sit with me.” Jesse begged.

Had he cried or was he too macho for that bullshit? Hanzo tried not to let every little thing that tumbled into his mind where grief had removed the usual filter cloud his judgement but he wondered if Jesse had cried. Max had been broken up about whatever happened between them, so much so that he had been out late at night and was murdered for it. Did Jesse  _ cry _ when he heard?

Hanzo pulled himself up and sat beside Jesse. He allowed the heavy arm to rest around his shoulders and laid against the angel’s chest. Jesse’s breath hitched in a second before a warm tear dropped onto Hanzo’s forehead. “What will you do now that he’s gone?”

“Same thing I did before, Darlin’... I’ll miss him.” Jesse rest his cheek on Hanzo’s hair even though the warm tears made his dark hair stick to the chestnut beard.

“They think I killed him.”

“I know,” Jesse seemed to know a lot of things and Hanzo wasn’t sure how he felt about that.  _ ‘Does he know about the messages?’ _

“How?” Hanzo pushed back from his chest so he could watch the angel closely. He was hopeless at reading emotions but that didn’t stop him from trying. Jesse was surprisingly easy to read in some ways and impossible in others.

“I had a detective talk t’ me. Reyes, I think he said he was. Said he was investigatin’ you.”

“Yeah, that sounds like him.” Hanzo stood up and hugged himself tightly while closing his eyes and beginning to pace. He’d walked this same path back and forth so many times that he didn’t even need to see to know exactly how many steps it took to get from one side of the room to the other. “I didn’t murder him.” He didn’t know why he even needed to dispute that fact. He’d been home with Jesse when it happened. He had an alibi.

“I know you didn’t, sugar.” Jesse leaned forward as he watched Hanzo pace. The latter chanced opening his eyes but closed them at the thinly veiled pain he found scrawled across Jesse’s face. “I don’t know who Max pissed off but I’ve known him too long t’ not see this comin’. Hell, that’s the whole reason he had a list of people t’ be notified if he died.”

Because Max had expected to die young.

The thought of that swept through Hanzo so harshly that Jesse had to launch himself from the couch just to catch him so he didn’t hit his head on the coffee table on the way down. “Darlin’--” Jesse grunted as he hauled Hanzo into his arms and sat him on the couch before kneeling down in front of him again. He was searching Hanzo’s eyes as if they could tell him what was happening.  _ Hanzo _ didn’t even know what was going on in his mind right now.

“Darlin’, I saw that guy for the contract today,” Jesse swallowed harshly as he reached up and gently pushed Hanzo’s hair out of his face. “I was wonderin’ if yer offer still stands. About bunking here with you.”

“You’re staying?” Hanzo asked as he tilted his face into the hand that had moved to hold his cheek. He raised both of his own hands to hold Jesse’s arm close. They barely knew each other, and Hanzo hated to be touched, but somehow this was different.

“Of course. I wanna be here fer Max’s funeral ‘n I’ve got the contract ‘n… I mean, I also wanna be here with you.” Jesse stroked his thumb against Hanzo’s cheek, swiping away the tears. “‘N after this contract, I was hopin’ you might be willin’ t’ move back to New Mexico with me. Hell, I might not even take it.”

Hanzo couldn’t shake the idea that Jesse wasn’t being completely honest and he didn’t know why. Something wasn’t  _ right. _

“I don’t know if I can leave Philly,” Hanzo pulled back. “I’ve never been anywhere else. I don’t know anyone anywhere else.”

“I think leavin’ this place might be good for you, Han.” Jesse scoot forward and swallowed a lump of something in his throat.

“Why wouldn’t you take the contract?” Hanzo asked as he played back Jesse’s previous words and tried to ascertain what was so off about them. “Why would you come all the way out here and get stranded with me but not take the contract?”

“I don’t know if this guy wants to be found.”

Was it ever really that simple? “You’re a bounty hunter, aren’t you? Do any of your targets want to be found?” What made this one different from all the others that had come before? Jesse broke the eye contact and gave a half-hearted shrug.

“Sometimes people ask me t’ find their loved ones. This man wants me t’ find his son. I’m not so sure his son wants, or  _ needs, _ t’ be found.” Jesse stood up and stretched out his bad knee for a little while. “I wanna get away from the place that killed Max, Hanzo… and I’d really like t’ take you with me.”

“This is my home.” Hanzo stood up and forced himself past Jesse to start putting groceries away. His stomach was reminding him that he still needed to eat, even if he didn’t want to. The frozen lasagna was starting to defrost on the floor. He picked it up and scoffed; Max would’ve thrown a conniption if he’d known that they were about to eat that.

Hanzo looked up at a soft set of footfalls from the half wall as Jesse leaned heavily on it. “I bought it before I’d realized what I did.” He murmured and Hanzo had already started to unwrap it.

“Max will spin in his grave,” Hanzo said softly, checking the back of the package before setting the oven to the correct temperature. This plastic did  _ not _ want to come off. He reached behind him to grab a knife from one of the drawers, starting to try and pry it open. These knives were dull but he just needed it to rip open packaging.

“I don’t think he would, Sug’.” Jesse shrugged as he pushed off from the wall as Hanzo struggled with it. “He hated these things like nobody else, but he also believed nobody oughta go without food.  _ ‘Specially _ Italian food.”

Hanzo smiled despite himself because that  _ did _ sound like Max.

Looking up at Jesse had caused him to lose his attention on the box he was trying to slice open. Hanzo’s hand came loose and the knife that had been too dull to puncture plastic showed itself perfectly sharp enough to slice through flesh. Hanzo dropped the box and the knife in one go, barely hearing Jesse’s sound of alarm because his attention was so wrapped up in the cut on his hand. The knife had sliced cleanly between the first and second knuckle of his pointer finger and dark blood began to well up.

It was black like ink.

“Hanzo, your hand!” Jesse gasped, grabbing the nearby kitchen towel and grabbed his fingers to try and hold pressure on the wound. “Are you ok, baby? Think it’ll need stitches?”

Hanzo pulled away, pushing the towel out of his way. Was he the only person who could see that? Did Jesse not know or  _ care _ that his hand was bleeding ink like one of those monsters out there? He’d gotten mugged by a group of them, how did Jesse not recognize that?

_ What was he? _

His hand came loose of Jesse’s, much to the angel’s alarm, and he stared at the his bright red palm smeared in blood. The ink was gone and in its place was the sticky and warm gushing blood he knew so well.

“Hanzo have you lost yer everlovin’ mind?” Jesse’s voice broke him out of the stupor of watching blood stream down his forearm. The angel took his hand again and began to squeeze it so hard that even through the daze, Hanzo registered pain. “We gotta get you t’ a doctor!”

“It’s not that bad--” Hanzo whispered and Jesse gave him a sharp expression in rebuttal.

“It’s  _ gushin’, _ sweetheart. Y’ nicked an artery. Hold this.”

Hanzo dumbly held pressure on the injury as Jesse went to the front room and began pulling his boots and coat on all the while calling for a ride from a replacement cell phone he must have also gotten while he was out.

“I can’t afford to go to the emergency room.” Hanzo mumbled. He had no paperwork, save for an itin number. He didn’t qualify for medicaid.

“We’re going to whatever place is closest ‘n I’m payin’ fer it.” Jesse wasn’t about to take no for an answer as he grabbed a blanket to wrap around Hanzo’s shoulders and start helping him put on his shoes.

“Why are you doing this for me?”

Jesse stopped halfway through tying the shoelace and looked up at Hanzo. “I already lost somebody I loved today, Hanzo.” Suddenly the way his lips twisted made sense. It was pain. “I know we don’t hardly know each other but I care about you. I’d like t’ get t’ know you better.”

“It’s just a finger, Jesse. I won’t bleed out.” Hanzo smiled despite himself. Angels were strange creatures.

“But you could get infected or lose the finger ‘n, baby, a doctor bill is a cheap alternative t’ that.”

\--

“Am I weird?”

Ena sat his coffee down on the table beside Hanzo before settling into the chair across from his usual in the corner of Thunderbird with a bewildered expression. Hanzo was perfectly aware that just the question itself was a little weird but ever since that morning, it had been plaguing him. Max had been convinced that he was losing time. So much so that he’d gone out of his way to write a program that would alert Hanzo to that fact if anything ever became of Max.

His landlord huffed out air, running his fingers through his long red-brown hair while he tried to figure out how to answer that. “Well, uh--” He gestured to the computer with a wry smile. “You’ve sat in my coffee shop every morning for the better part of the last decade writing gay smut and managed to convince yourself no one else knew what you were doing.” He raised the eyebrow that included two parallel hairline scars.

“That’s a fair point,” Hanzo shrugged. So maybe ‘weird’ wasn’t the phrasing he should be using here. He shook his head and stared back at the blank document that was supposed to be the next chapter to his great fandom masterwork. Since the day he’d found Jesse, he hadn’t been able to write anything of substance. “Forget I said anything.”

“No,” Ena looked concerned and Hanzo didn’t like knowing that he’d worried his friend. “Did someone say something to you?” He bent closer to the table so he could try and catch Hanzo’s downturned eyes.

Jesse had left the apartment early that morning and Hanzo couldn’t help thinking that he’d done something wrong. After all, they’d spent the better half of the afternoon sitting in a waiting room before a doctor sewed his hand shut and sent him on his way. That finger was never going to feel correctly again; every time it touched the table the tingle went all the way up to Hanzo’s wrist.

“Nobody said anything to me,” it was equal parts lie and truth. Did a text message count as ‘saying’ something? “Doesn’t everyone wonder that?”

“Not at age forty,” Halháta snorted through his nose. “Once you reach a threshold in life, you either accept or deny the ‘weird’ and move on.”

“I’m missing the first thirty years, so maybe I’m finally experiencing my teenage angst.” Hanzo wanted to grin but he just didn’t have it in him this morning.

“Shit, that would explain a lot.” Ena joked back but the smile fell dead on his lips. “Are you ok, Hanzo? Seriously. Detective Reyes was bumping around in here yesterday and said your friend was murdered. Did you go see your therapist?”

“No,” Hanzo shrugged and closed his laptop. It was almost time to leave and he wasn’t getting anything written anyway. “I fired her.”

“You fired your therapist.” Ena rubbed his face, “Of course you did.”

“Why do you say it like that?” Hanzo scowled, sipping his coffee as he began to pack up to head to work. Despite the homicide, the library had been opened up quickly because it sat in a major intersection. Even a murder didn’t shut down Philadelphia for too long.

“Because firing your therapist stops you from receiving any therapy.” He picked up the iced drink with ‘Mei’ on the counter and handed that over to Hanzo who was pulling his bag over his shoulder.

“It’s been ten years. I think I’ll be ok without a therapist for a while. They’re expensive, they’re not covered under my insurance, and it’s been  _ ten years.” _ Hanzo wished he’d never asked. Who knew that asking something so innocent would garner the Spanish Inquisition. “I think I’ll be fine for a few months.”

“What about your doctor?” Halháta asked, walking with Hanzo to the door.

“I went to my shrink a couple of months ago.”

“Did they say anything new?”

Hanzo scoffed. “My scans are all normal, they still don’t know what caused the memory loss, I’m a mess that needs depression medication. It’s all the same.”

Ena pulled his lips to the side while Hanzo headed to the door with his coffees. “That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it.”

“I don’t care to speak on what you want to speak about.” Hanzo snapped and buried his face in his scarf as he braved the Philly weather.

Any other day he might feel bad about snapping at Ena like that. Today wasn’t like any other day. Hanzo sipped his coffee and opted to use public transportation to get to work instead of walking. It was too cold and, at least today, he needed to treat himself.

Walking up to the steps of the library where the evidence of the investigation surrounding Max was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. Everywhere he looked, the evidence was still there from the footprints in the snow to pieces of evidence tape still stuck to the light post where it had been tied.

\---

Work wouldn’t be work without Max strutting around. For someone so important in his life, Hanzo was only now realizing how little he’d actually spoken to him while they worked. It was two different departments; IT versus a librarian. He looked up to catch Amélie making it into the building just in front of him. She usually did make it to work first, it would be good to talk to her again. He passed her desk, second from the left, that still had paperwork on it from the last time they had worked.

He wondered if the police had opened Max’s desk. It had never been officially given to Max but the hacker had adopted a drawer from the old apothecary chest in the very back of the store room and could often be found digging through its contents. They kept all the new books that had been acquired from either garage sales, donations or other sources back here, just waiting to be sorted and shelved. The library was large enough to house a decent collection but there was also an entire section of the store room reserved for a cycling collection of popular classics. Some things went out, others came in. Books were retired from time to time or sometimes the old were sold to make room for new.

In the very back of the store room, there was a chest that had once belonged to a pharmacy that had long since been torn down. They kept the tags they organized the books with, paper and other office supplies in there, but Max’d also stashed his computer supplies in the drawer.

Hanzo started to open drawers, looking through them. Paper, rulers, pipe cleaners, stickers--

Computer tools. Hanzo pulled that drawer out further, shuffling through the tools. He didn’t know what he’d expected to find in there but this wasn’t it. There was nothing here but a collection of screwdrivers, half used canned air, and old sticks of RAM. For a man who was sending out messages posthumously, his favorite place to stash things was remarkably bare on the inside. He even looked toward the back of the drawer to see if anything had been shoved up there. There were a few wrenches but nothing of note.

There  _ had _ to be something somewhere. Why would Max leave him with a message like this only to have nothing to follow it up? Hanzo grunted and shut the drawer back. It slid about three quarters of the way shut and then halted so he pulled it out some and tried again. No luck, something must be stuck. He pulled one of the screwdrivers out and tried to use that to smooth the offending wrench stuck up in the way.

Damn all these tools and this shallow drawer. There were other drawers that were deeper, why would Max choose  _ this _ drawer for all his stuff? Hanzo pulled on the drawer to completely take it out because he couldn’t reach the offending wrench from this position. As the drawer came off its wooden center rail and Hanzo found himself overwhelmed by the weight of it. He almost dropped it as it came out and had to lower the drawer to the ground instead of hold it.

It seemed so much larger on the outside…

“What are you doing?” Hanzo flipped around to see Amélie standing in the door with her eyes narrowed at him. She didn’t come to the stockroom as often as he did, so it seemed odd for her to be here.

“I’m looking through Max’s tools,” Hanzo waved a hand at the drawer. “I need to tighten the screw on my chair and the drawer doesn’t want to shut.” He was a good liar, just not to her.

“I don’t believe you.” She came forward, looking over the drawer and the screwdriver in his hand.

“Believe me or don’t.” Hanzo shrugged and kept fussing with the tools to get them arranged again. “Where have you been, anyway?” It wasn’t like her to keep quiet for this long. Then Max died and she just showed up to work like nothing had happened? “I’ve been trying to get ahold of you for days.”

“I’ve been busy,  _ mon chou.” _ Amélie tilted her head up and sniffed. She’d always been standoffish before but that had never applied to him.

“Be busy somewhere else. I have to lock the door behind me.” He replaced the drawer and pushed it back into place.

“Have it your way.” She sniffed, looking behind her as she began to walk out the door. “We all miss Max, you don’t have to be an asshole.”

Hanzo sneered at her back, waiting until the door shut to curse. This wasn’t about missing Max or being an asshole, it was about wanting to be alone. He turned back to the drawer and ripped it back out so he could shove the screwdriver back in. As it scraped the bottom of the drawer, something sounded... _ weird. _

He looked down and tapped the bottom before opening the drawer beside it and comparing them. It wasn’t his imagination, they both should have been the same size, but the one Max used for his tools was markedly more shallow than the other.

It had a false bottom.

Hanzo’s eyes widened and he pulled the drawer out again to dump the tools out and use one of the screwdrivers to try and pry it up. Once the tools were out it was easy to find the small cut out near the back and pry up the bottom but nothing prepared him for what he found inside.

Had he not been looking at it, Hanzo wouldn’t have believed it. Never in his wildest dreams would he imagine opening one of Max’s drawers and finding a cache. It looked like something straight out of a b-rated spy flick! There were passports rubber banded together, multiple currencies all collected with money clips and a high powered camera. That was probably the camera that took the picture Max’s program had sent him.

It was easier to refer to what had messaged him as Max’s program and ignore the fact that it was Max who had wrote the messages that it was programmed to send. Who  _ was _ this guy?

Near the bottom of the actual drawer was a manila envelope curled to follow the contour with his name on it. Hanzo was almost afraid to reach inside and pull the envelope out but he couldn’t ignore it. It had his name on it. He had either been intended to locate it or it had information about him inside.

_ ‘This is obstruction of justice,’ _ Hanzo’s mind helpfully supplied. If it did include incriminating evidence of him, the last thing he wanted was for the police to find it. They already thought that he’d killed Max. They didn’t need anything else. He opened the envelope and a large collection of photographs fell out into his lap. The first few he recognized. They were recent enough but was only him going to the store or working on his computer at Thunderbird. He didn’t understand why Max would have surveillance photos of him like this, though. What would he have had to gain from this?

Hanzo flipped the photo in his hand over to check the back for any information about when or why it was taken but instead of that there was only a pink sugar skull stamp. Every photo had that same stamp on it. What did it mean? The ‘Ghost’ that Max liked to shove everywhere was something Hanzo was familiar with seeing but this didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen.

He kept going through the photos. There were ones of him and Amélie. Him by himself. Him younger. None of these seemed particularly interesting until he got to the one at the end.

He was standing in front of a large bell beside the brightly smiling face he would’ve recognized anywhere. Max had a picture of him and Genji. Genji had been real and they were standing right beside each other in nearly matching white and orange outfits and Max had a picture of it. Where were they? What was going on? Why hadn’t Max told him about this--

Everyone had thought Genji wasn’t real and all this time Max had had a photo of him. He flipped this one over and beneath the pink stamp was a single word scrawled in Max’s terrible chicken scratch handwriting: Hanamura.

Snowball fights and pink trees that glowed from within flashed behind his eyes before it was gone again. Max knew where he was from.  _ Max knew who he used to be. _

Why wasn’t there anything else in here? If he’d found enough about him to find this, wouldn’t Max know his last name? Who had he been? Who was this person? Hanzo barely even recognized the scowling clean shaven face of the teenager standing there but it was undeniably him.

Hanzo pulled out his phone and started to scroll through his messages, looking at the photograph Max had sent him while wracking his brain to place it. When was this? 1:48 in the morning of December 9th. Where was he on the morning of December 9th? This couldn’t even be real. At that time of the morning he should have been asleep. How would he even corroborate a story like this if Reyes questioned him about this?

What he needed was an alibi. December 9th. December 9th. That would’ve been the night that Amélie was over with him, wouldn’t it?

He took the manila envelope before walking into the office, flicking on the shredder and sent the entire thing through it. None of this could be allowed to survive. Once it was all shredded, Hanzo grabbed it and threw it into the old wood furnace that survived back here for reasons unknown and lit it on fire. The police department could not be allowed to find that.

If anyone could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this picture was a forgery, it would be Amélie. She was there with him when it would’ve been taken and she could finally put this whole thing to bed once and for all. He replaced the drawer carefully so that it was just as it had been, ignoring the voice in the back of his head that reminded him of fingerprints.

This photograph was not real and he was determined to prove it.

“Where is Amélie?” Hanzo asked Zen as he came out of the store room and the Buddhist monk stopped in his tracks and just stared at Hanzo with wide eyes. Hanzo had just finished making a circuit around the entire Library and he hadn’t found her anywhere. He wasn’t going to just keep searching in vain, he didn’t have time for this.

Hanzo growled under his breath and rubbed the bridge of his forehead before deciding to just ask again. “Zen, please. Where is she?” She’d been there just a few minutes before, chiding him in the store room and now it was as if she’d just vanished from the face of the planet.

“She’s gone, Hanzo.” Zen licked his lips timidly as if he were debating just how to say this.

Did she seriously already leave? Hanzo sighed raggedly in annoyance and grabbed his jacket from the back of his desk. “I’m going home early, Zen. Nobody has been in all day and all the backlog is finished. I know you like it if I stay the whole shift, but I’m going stir crazy. All this with Max and--” He shook his head, “I’ve got to get out of here.”

“I understand,” Zenyatta nodded, though his expression didn’t seem any less torn than before. Hanzo was getting sick of people hiding things from him. Max knew who he was and hadn’t bothered to tell him, Jesse was hiding something and now this. “Take the time that you need.”

Hanzo huffed, shaking his head and walking for the door. Mei was still sipping on her now melted coffee at her desk, left from the door. Second desk from the left was empty save for a thin layer of dust.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hi guys! As you probably know by now, I've been hanging out with the Author of Of Monsters And Men (she is fantastic and the story is amazing, it's definitely worth a read), and we hang out in a discord server together for fans, authors, anyone to really hang out and enjoy ruminating on good fanfiction. Sometimes we post sneak peaks and every so often, I need a beta to read the new chapter before it goes up.
> 
> If you're interested in something like that, here is the link: https://discord.gg/hR2wUbD
> 
> We'd love to see you there! As always, please leave a comment if you like it along with any theories or questions you might have. I love hearing from you all and thank you!
> 
> Ladie


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